Father of PlayStation: Who is Ken Kutaragi?

Ken Kutaragi was born in Tokyo, Japan. Growing up in a middle-class family, Kutaragi was both a good student and worked in a factory where he discovered his mechanical abilities. When his desire to repair combined with his curiosity in electronics, he enrolled at the University of Electro-Communications in the 1970s.

Immediately after graduating, Kutaragi began working in a digital research laboratory at Sony in the mid-1970s. Seen as an excellent problem solver and forward-thinking engineer at Sony, Kutaragi quickly gained fame at the company by successfully completing many of the projects he started. Kutaragi, who became aware of the interest in the field of gaming towards the end of the 1980s, agreed with Nintendo for a small project on behalf of Sony. This project was later replaced by the idea of developing a game console together.

Ken Kutaragi (born 2 August 1950) is a Japanese engineering technologist and businessman. He is the former chairman and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), the video game division of Sony Corporation, and current president and CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment. He is known as "The Father of the PlayStation", as he oversaw the development of the original console and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 3. He departed Sony in 2007, a year after the PlayStation 3 was released.

In 1989, Sony started working on a project suggested by Kutaragi. The project was to develop a new generation game console product with superior sound and graphics features together with Nintendo. Nintendo dominated computer gaming at the time, and Sony was eager to get in on the action. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 1991, Sony introduced the world to a video game console it was working on with Nintendo. However, the day after Sony announced this, Nintendo announced that it would break its agreement with Sony by partnering with Philips.

Kutaragi was very confident in this project and convinced Sony to continue on his own. He even reportedly threatened to resign if Sony canceled the project. So engineer Kutaragi started working, bringing the people at the top of Sony with him. Still, not everyone in the company believed it should continue. Some people thought that the time and money devoted to this project was a waste and argued that Sony should not enter the gaming business.

It is stated that Kutaragi said exactly this in a meeting with Sony's board of directors: "Are you going to sit back and accept what Nintendo did to us?" Thereupon, the company moved Kutaragi and nine team members to Sony Music in Tokyo. Sony Music's involvement was a crucial step in PlayStation's success. Because music was a big business at that time the company could attract talents in this field. Knowing how to produce, market, and distribute music discs, Sony Music began using it to create games.

World Giant PlayStation

A few years later, the console called PlayStation, which the company was working on, became the main product and a launch was organized for it. The launch was an incredible success. The 100,000 consoles produced just for that day were sold instantly. Subsequently, an additional 200,000 units were sold in the first 30 days of the console being available to the public. A year later, in 1995, PlayStation was introduced in the United States. With this introduction, the whole world now knows about PlayStation. Within a year, almost two million copies were sold in the United States and more than seven million worldwide. By the end of 2003, the company reached 100 million sales.

PlayStation 2, introduced in 2000, achieved similar success. Without Kutaragi's insistence and determination, the company would not have taken such a path and would not have achieved this success. On top of all this, Ken Kutaragi became the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment.