Apart from the powerful allure of the hardware itself, two factors helped Sony’s cause enormously. The first was that western developers and publishers were starting to move toward producing games heavy with full-motion video for CD-ROM on PCs, and experimenting with 3D. The second was that Japanese publishers were finding creating games for Sega and Nintendo expensive, risky – and slow. They were used to ten-to-12-week lead times for cartridges, meaning that they had to manufacture game cartridges according to forecasts and had difficulty reacting to actual demand. Sony offered an order system that was just seven to ten days. “It was a massive shift in the economics,” explains Harrison. “The working capital requirement shifted massively in favour of the developer and publisher, and they could afford to put more money into product development and marketing, so it was a virtuous circle.” The idea of a 3D-capable, CD-ROM-based console and a different way of doing business was a breath of fresh air for all.

Another major attraction for third parties was that Sony didn’t have internal development studios until early 1994. Though a weakness for Sony because it meant an almost complete reliance on external partners for PlayStation’s early software, third parties saw it as an advantage because it meant less competition. But Sony wasn’t entirely without capacity, having acquired Psygnosis in May 1993. It was a loose relationship – Psygnosis retained its publishing business, which released games for other platforms, but it played a vital role in creating PlayStation development tools that ran on PCs rather than the early kits, which were large, repurposed Sony NEWS workstations. “Psygnosis came to a large meeting at the Alexis Park Hotel in Las Vegas during CES 1994 – 11 months before the launch of the machine in Japan – with an early prototype of a working development environment that was far in advance of anything that had come out of Japan,” says Harrison. Psygnosis, of course, would go on to make Wipeout and publish Destruction Derby for the European launch lineup in September 1995.



It was Namco’s Ridge Racer that stood out by far among the Japanese launch games. Visiting Namco’s Yokohama tech centre, Harrison saw the finished game a few weeks before the December 3 release. “I’d seen an earlier workin- progress build a couple of months before, but they’d done the port from the coin-op remarkably quickly. I remember realising that was going to be pivotal piece of software for the west in particular.” But then he saw one of the pieces of software that would help define the console’s later success. “It was almost an afterthought. One of the men demonstrating it asked, since I was there, would I like them to show me another game they’re working on? ‘Yeah, sure’, I said. ‘What’s it called?’ ‘It’s called Tekken’.”

The rest of the launch games were rather less memorable. “With the notable exception of Ridge Racer, there is no way you’d extrapolate the global success that happened from that first lineup,” concedes Harrison. And that’s including Kazanori Yamauchi’s Motor Toon Grand Prix, a title he made before forming Polyphony to create Gran Turismo. But the 100,000 units Sony made for Japanese launch day sold out all the same. “It was an incredible undertaking from all manner of perspectives,” says Harrison. “Manufacturing, financial, buying the components, getting the distribution infrastructure in place to ship them – we started manufacturing probably around October to hit the launch date.”

Another 200,000 sold in the console’s first 30 days on sale. This was at a price of ¥39,800 – which at the time translated to $390, or £245 – compared to Sega’s Saturn launch price of ¥44,800 the month before. Though instrumental to PlayStation’s success, price was a contentious issue at Sony, because, against all corporate tradition, PlayStation would be sold at a loss. While Kutaragi had initially forecast that memory prices would go down, the truth was that, ten months before launch, they were going up – and they’d stay high all the way up until late 1995. The trend was principally due to booming PC sales, but, ever resolute, Kutaragi stuck to his guns, declaring that they would certainly come down over time, and that every competitor was in the same position. And besides, the PlayStation business was to be quite different from Sony’s conventional appliance business, which depended on direct profits from hardware sales, because in games, profits could instead be gained from software sales. The policy was still hard to reconcile with Sony’s old guard until Kutaragi dropped certain hardware features, such as the original model’s S-Video port.



This pricing policy allowed SCEI to severely dent the fortunes of Sega’s Saturn in the US. Famously, Saturn was surprise-launched in the US at $399 during E3 on May 11, 1995, but the timing allowed Sony to immediately get the upper hand. Harrison was at Sony’s E3 press conference shortly afterwards: “Olaf Olafsson was doing the spiel about growth in the industry and droning on – it was deliberately staged that way. I can’t remember a single thing about his presentation, but he did say that he’d like to bring on stage the president of Sony Computer Entertainment America to share with you an important piece of information. Steve Race went up to the microphone, just said ‘299’, and sat back down again. The room erupted.” But staff at Sony’s corporate headquarters weren’t amused. “It was properly agreed, but word had not made its way back to Japan and there were parts of Sony scratching their heads in shock,” says Deering. “I think Tokunaka got in trouble. It was a scary thing for them.”