The Story Of PlayStation

THE STORY OF PLAYSTATION

(PlayStation. Image from wikimedia commons)

RECAP

It's been a while since I posted updates to this series, so maybe a brief recap is in order. In previous instalments, we learned of how Sony's PlayStation was originally intended to be a CD peripheral for Nintendo, but when that company decided to work with Philips instead, Sony decided to work on a new console. Ken Kutaragi, now known as the 'father of PlayStation', had been impressed by the capabilities of a computer known as System G and wanted to bring its realtime 3D graphics capability to the home console market. When the specifications for PlayStation made their way into the hands of Sega's Hayoa Nakayama, he realised that their upcoming Saturn was very much underpowered in comparison.

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

It’s a credit to Sega’s engineers that they did indeed manage to have the Saturn ready in time for the 22ndNovember. Although it was the most expensive unit the company had produced, the sales figures suggested it was Sega’s most successful console in Japan. This was no doubt helped by the presence of a Virtua Fighter conversion. It took only two days for Saturn to sell out and when Sony joined the fray on 3rdDecember 1994, Saturn outsold PlayStation by a ratio of 2:1. It seemed that experience really was a match for mere hype. However, the fact was that Sega’s sales figures represented the amount of copies sold to retailers. Sony’s figures represented the consoles actually sitting in people’s homes. There was nothing underhand about Sega’s figures. In fact, it was standard practice to judge success in such a way (and it explains how companies might order more games than machines). But the truth was that many Saturns were remaining on the shelves. This was because Virtua Fighter seemed to be the only game worth investing in. The Saturn’s rushed architecture was causing problems.

It seems a commonly held view that Sega took the approach of bolting 3D capabilities on top of what they had; that they simply added another CPU. This is an unfair appraisal of the ‘Away Team’s’ efforts. (The Away Team was the name given to the group responsible for Saturn’s redesign). In actual fact, the old machine was ripped apart and rebuilt almost from scratch. Still, time was very much an issue, so while Hideki Sato and his team put a lot more work into the redesign than simply adding a new CPU, they just didn’t have time to construct a 32bit design using the best components. They had to make do with whatever technology lay closest to hand.

(Sega's Saturn. Image from wikimedia commons)

The question of how Saturn might be brought up to speed had been met with at least two answers. Sega Of America’s Tom Kalinske had approached Silicon Graphics, a company partly responsible for PlayStation’s 3D capability. After this meeting, Kalinske proposed a design based around a single chip that (in his opinion) could match the PlayStation’s performance. The Away team came up with a different idea, based around parallel processing. The Saturn would have dual processors made by Hitachi called SH-2s and individual tasks could be shared amongst the processors, thereby resulting in increased efficiency. The engineers at Sega and various academics had been experimenting with such an approach for some time. Arcade games like Outrun used twin Motorola CPUs and, because its CPU worked in tandem with that of its host console, the Mega CD was also a dual-processor console.

But, although Sega engineers grasped the idea, the rest of the videogame industry was apparently finding it a struggle. The trouble lay in getting all the components working together and some companies seemed content to use just a single CPU and VDP. The main problem seemed to be that Sega had not devoted time to building a proper environment that would enable teams to work in parallel processing. Whereas before developers might’ve had sufficient time to learn its intricate design, the increased commercialism of the industry insisted that ‘time is money’. Those working on Saturn were not given the luxury of sitting down and exploring the workings of its architecture. As for PlayStation, developers would also need time to learn how to speak to its hardware, but Sony had created a system that meant programmers didn’t need to. This was called the software library.

When working with PlayStation, developers had a running start. The library meant that programmers needed to learn C (and not the workings of the machine) if they wanted to create games. Because C was a relatively simple thing to learn, it’s fair to say that PlayStation was better suited to the ‘time is money’ ethic. The Saturn, with its parallel processing, required developers to spend time getting to grips with the hardware; time they didn’t have. Although on paper the Saturn was a powerful machine, it was PlayStation whose environment was geared toward efficient game creation. Maybe if Tom Kalinske’s single chip design had been adopted, things would’ve been different. Kalinske himself commented, the Japanese are making decisions for the US market and they do not know what they are doing. As the deadline for the US launch approached, this observation would prove to be rather prophetic....

REFERENCES

Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakawa

The Ultimate History of Videogames by Steven L. Kent

Trigger Happy by Steven Poole