The making of Playstation | Hacker News Reader

The making of Playstation

edge-online.com

33 pointsKeyframe6 comments

Very nostalgic. As a games developer at the time - some of the things I remember as being important:

The setting into which it arrived:

Games for the successful cartridge based machines were selected and scheduled by Nintendo & SEGA. There were a limited number of slots per season - competition within genres was avoided, often in favour of in-house games, or allied publishers.

There was a wave of CD based machines at various levels of development. These were characterised by wince inducing hyperbole, a lack of attention to any of the media of which they were supposed to represent the convergence, and an inability to engage with the developers who had any chance of creating titles that would sell.

I remember the first 3DO developer conference - big hotel bash - hot swag (why embroider an off-the-shelf shoulder bag when you can have one made exactly to your specs), Incomprehensible eulogies delivered by new-media 'visionaries', and, um, the chocolate CD. Meanwhile, the experienced games developers who were calling out the inadequacies of the hardware and OS were being told that they were irrelevant, and to shut up.

This was not a happy place for games developers - between the politics and uncertainty of the cartridge machines, and the approaching new-media desert.

Into this arrived Sony:

They had bought a UK game developer - Psygnosis, who had (IIRC, courtesy of SN Systems) sorted out a good set of PC based development tools with english documentation.

Once they had something to show, they invited ~100 UK developers to Great Marlborough Street for a chat - other than knowledge - the giveaways ran to a cup of coffee & a couple of biscuits (1).

The tech. demos using a slow prototype (so T-Rex's head only) were fascinating, but other things were more significant: The attendance list demonstrated to those within it that Sony really 'got it' - this was a peer group of people who had made, and were making, games in the UK, and having assembled that audience, the Psygnosis staff (a part of that peer-group), explained how they wanted to help us make games - IIRC, not much persuading was needed.

(Another memorable moment was the opening of the first Devcon in London - several hundred developers in a huge conference room. Phil Harrison(IIRC) walks onto the stage and casually asks if it is anyone's birthday today. A few hand's go up. "Happy Birthday - here, have a Playstation" and indeed, those bodies got machines (at that time, rarer than hen's teeth))

(1) There may also have been sandwiches.

I have been a rather young animators apprentice back then and I remember videos from A|W and Softimage circulating about from the salesmen about their representative software. I still remember A|W video they've sent us which showcased PowerAnimator 9.5 (Still miss it's OptiFX quality, not the same as in Maya!) and guys from Naughty dog working on something not yet released (Crash Bandicoot). I clearly remember watching that VHS sitting at my workstation (Indigo2 Maximum Impact) and looking at those guys also on Indigo2's (regular graphics, green ones) like they had a fun of their life, while I was preping color corrected shots for an alcohol drink commercial, sigh. There were big wars back then between A|W and softimage, there was even an alliance PR from Psygnosis, Konami and SEGA which stated they will use Softimage only for their games. SEGA later developed Animanium, which is a shame it never reached target audience - it went bust (Animanium, that is).

Wow. If you read this story carefully, you begin to understand that Apple totally copied Sony's Playstation model for the iPhone and its application platform. Applying music development/sales disciplines to the videogame market seems to be a winning proposition. One might also say that, as Sony has failed to figure out how to effectively sell music online, it may have problems effectively selling videogames online as well; there might not be any correlation, however it's an interesting Sunday afternoon thought.

Thanks for posting this, Keyframe.

I have stumbled upon this on slashdot ' it is a rather interesting article, Upon further linkage I've found this other submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580391 - it carries even more interesting stuff. However, I am still trying to find the book "Game Over" I've had... seems like I've lost it somewhere, which makes me extremely sad. That book, my friends, is full of suspense, nostalgia, business know-how etc.

edit: the book I'm talking about is this: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-American-Industry/d...

A very interesting article, but poorly written. The first paragraph is filled with disjointed thoughts "It's not a story .... Nor is it just the story .... It's also the story". It's not, or it is?

"The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected ...". That's a disagreement.

Don't they have editors for this stuff or do they just publish straight from the author to the website?

Yes, the article seems kind of incoherent. samlittlewood's comment above was a better read.

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