I was not.
They had this big video screen and every minute they kept showing this live action video they had made to introduce the Playstation. It was the first time that the idea that video games could be publicly cool entered, I think, so many people’s minds. Clearly the marketing people, and maybe [former Sony executive in charge of Playstation] Ken Kutaragi, drove this. I’m not sure where it came from, this mandate. But, that clearly was the intent. Because this video was cool kids playing video games. It was cool games like Wipeout. It was cool music. It was like, as proud as I am to fly my geek flag, there was something really neat about the idea that Sony was positioning video games to be something that could appeal to a lot more people, and could actually be something seen as a cool activity versus an activity, up until that point, had really been shoved into the basements of geek households. I thought that those were the two things that when we saw Playstation, both the marketing endeavor at E3, and the original 3D graphics, and what the games can be a year before that, those were the things to this day stand out as moments that were like “wow, this industry is changing.”
I think in a lot of ways, people talk about MOVE or 3D or 3D graphics or physics or whatever as what the Playstation brand has brought to the market, of which there are many things. I really think one of the biggest things that Playstation did, and Sony did for video games, really is opening up an entire world to this great hobby, that up until that point, really had been the territory of geek hobbyists like myself, and suddenly making it cool and making it acceptable. I think that is probably the greatest legacy of the Playstation.
When you think about the recent anniversary for the PS2, one of the things that emerges was that it was a trojan horse for the DVD format in the homes throughout America and the world, right? It’s a classic two-in-one argument. You’re getting a DVD player and a really great game machine. So Playstation has had a technical and a cultural component to it almost at every iteration. I think that’s part of its DNA at this point.
Right. I think so.
Another question: I’ve always heard that the Playstation is a hard machine to program for. Every iteration of the console, the way they manage memory, multitasking the processors, etc. Can you attest to that, if that was your experience? How did you learn to get comfortable with the hardware?
Yeah. I’m not a programmer. I’m kind of like, it’s the equivalent of asking a movie director that doesn’t operate his camera, hey is it true that this iteration of the Panaflex is a pain in the ass? I don’t know. So I can tell you what I hear, which is, certainly the PS1 wasn’t as bad of a beast. I know, at the beginning, the PS2 took awhile for people to get their heads around. But eventually they did. PS3, to be perfectly fair, I think that’s a pretty accurate statement. Even to this day there are guys, who are some of the best in the business, are still like, “Yeah, this is a great machine, but man it’s a beast.”