Ken Kuturagi, former SIE president and often referred to as the “Father of PlayStation,” claimed that everyone at Sony thought PlayStation would fail.
At the Tokyo Game Show this week, Kutaragi spoke about his ambitions to enter the gaming hardware field in the mid-90s.
“We wanted to share our passion,” Kuturagi told the audience. “We wanted to hear their expectations and what they didn’t expect. So we wanted to hear their opinions.
“So we visited dozens, if not hundreds, of companies, and we visited a lot of game publishers. It was a good memory. They weren’t interested.
“They just said, ‘Don’t do it.’ There were several companies, but none of them were successful. You will fail.’ That’s what they told us.”
Since leaving Sony in 2007, Kutaragi has served on the boards of e-commerce company Rakuten, app developer SmartNews and GA Technologies, which operates an AI-powered real estate listings website.
Kutaragi is best known as the designer of the original PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3. The engineer initially left Sony in 2007 after a challenging launch of the third console that cost Sony billions of dollars in losses.
Kutaragi remains at Sony as a senior technical advisor.
Kutaragi is perhaps best known for his arrogant remarks during PlayStation’s first three console era, including referring to the Xbox 360 as “just Xbox 1.5” and suggesting that PlayStation fans would have to work longer hours to be able to afford the $599 PS3. It will.