“Everyone told us we would fail,” Kutaragi said in a rare interview with AFP.

Featuring revolutionary 3D graphics and adult titles like “Tomb Raider” and “Metal Gear Solid,” the device first went on sale on December 3, 1994.

Previously, Nintendo’s NES console and similar gaming machines were considered “children’s toys,” said Kutaragi, 74.

Popular games like Super Mario Bros were two-dimensional, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) was a rarity, even in Hollywood.

“Most executives (at Sony) were vehemently against it,” Kutaragi said, fearing for the Japanese giant’s reputation as a maker of high-end electronics.

Japanese game manufacturers also reacted “icy” because the development of 3D games in real time seemed “unthinkable” at the time.

Back then, films using CGI took one to two years to make, with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, he said.

But Kutaragi, a Sony employee at the time, was undeterred.

“We wanted to make the most of technical progress to create a new form of entertainment,” said the engineer, his eyes shining.

His ambition paid off: the console – now in its fifth generation – became a household name. The PlayStation 2 was the best-selling games console in the world, with 160 million units sold.

Nintendo drama

Sony and its Japanese gaming giant Nintendo are industry rivals, but more than three decades ago they worked together to develop a CD-ROM reader compatible with the Super Nintendo console, which could only hold game cartridges.

With Nintendo’s permission, Sony also developed a device that could read both CDs and cassettes, with the working title “Play Station” – the first time the famous name was used.

But the good mood between the two ended dramatically.

Just hours after Sony unveiled its new project at a trade show in Las Vegas in 1991, Nintendo, unsettled by Sony’s rights to the games, announced that it would instead work with the Dutch company Philips.

The episode was seen as a betrayal and humiliation for Sony and all of these budding projects failed.

“The newspapers said it was bad for us,” Kutaragi said. But “it was inevitable that we and Nintendo would go our separate ways because our approaches were completely different.”

For Nintendo, “video games are toys that have nothing to do with technology,” he said.

And without the snub, the PlayStation as we know it “would never have seen the light of day.”

AI predictions

When Sony launched its PlayStation and CD games in Japan in 1994 and in Western countries a few months later, Nintendo had a stranglehold on console sales.

So Sony used its experience in the music industry to develop a new distribution model by selling the gadgets in electronics stores instead of toy stores and creating new supply chains adapted to local markets.

Kutaragi eventually became vice president of Sony, but left the conglomerate in 2007 after the launch of the PlayStation 3, which initially struggled commercially.

Now the future of the console market looks less bright as “cloud gaming” becomes more popular, something Kutaragi also predicted – along with mobile gaming years in advance.

“I have often thought about the future of technology over a 10- or 20-year period to predict new trends,” although “many people found that difficult to understand,” he said.

The engineer now runs a start-up with a focus on robotics and artificial intelligence and teaches at a Japanese university.

“We are entering a world where everything can be calculated,” Kutaragi said of a computer using AI.

For example, “the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT exists because language has become computable,” and similar technologies are used in fields as diverse as medicine, music, and fine art.

“Imagine if time and space were also computable,” he said.

“Right now, this is a possibility limited to the world of video games,” but “imagine if we could move to any location immediately,” Kutaragi said.

“What was once science fiction could become reality.”