PlayStation Creator Breaks the Myth: 'I Never Wanted to Crush Nintendo'
No revenge, no grudges, and not even a controller in hand anymore. At 76, Ken Kutaragi has left gaming behind, finds the Tokyo Game Show boring, and insists PlayStation was never created to ‘crush Nintendo.’ Everything you thought you knew? Wrong.
The story is gaming legend: betrayed by Nintendo in 1991, a Sony engineer vows revenge and gives birth to the PlayStation, launched in Japan in 1994. But the man at the center of it all rejects this narrative. Speaking in the UK last October, Ken Kutaragi gave an interview with GamesIndustry.biz where he dismantles the myth of Nintendo’s betrayal and delivers a scathing take on the industry he helped launch.
Image credit: Steampunk Avenue
The real story behind the Sony-Nintendo split
Before becoming Nintendo’s top rival, Ken Kutaragi worked hand in hand with the Kyoto giant. He designed the Super Famicom’s sound chip, then started developing a CD-ROM add-on for the console—a prototype called the “Play Station” (with a space). It was just meant to be a subsystem, nothing more. “I never imagined it would become the starting point for today’s PlayStation franchise,” he says.
Then came the earthquake. Nintendo abruptly broke off the partnership with Sony to team up with Philips on the SNES CD-ROM project. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president at the time, felt the deal put his company at a disadvantage. For Kutaragi, it was a shock. But what came next is surprising: “It turned into a good shock: OK, now we’re free to do whatever we want.” Where the legend tells of wounded pride, the engineer describes a sense of liberation. The shackles of working with Nintendo were gone, and with them, all creative constraints.
‘I never thought we had to crush them’
Kutaragi is adamant, repeating it over and over: “The story goes that I was in shock and decided to get revenge, but I never thought that way. […] I never believed we had to crush Nintendo.” PlayStation wasn’t a weapon of payback. It was a playground finally free from oversight. He didn’t see himself as a warrior, but as a creator unleashed.
It’s also worth remembering just how shaky the project was inside Sony. No one believed in this game console. No one, except Norio Ohga, the CEO at the time. “He liked my spirit of challenge,” Kutaragi recalls, with visible affection for the mentor who passed away in 2011. Without Ohga, PlayStation would probably have stayed a forgotten prototype in a drawer. The irony is delicious: one of entertainment’s biggest success stories hinged on the gut instinct of a single man, in a company that didn’t even want it.
And when you look at Kojima Dropped by Sony: A Journalist Was There and Tells All, you have to wonder if the company has lost the risk-taking spirit that Ohga embodied.
The current industry? ‘Nothing has changed,’ says Kutaragi
Kutaragi has moved on from PlayStation—he doesn’t even play games anymore, too busy running two companies and serving as dean at Kindai University—but he still keeps an eye on the industry. What he sees doesn’t excite him. Visiting Tokyo Game Show this year, his verdict was blunt: “Nothing has changed. The graphics are a bit better, but everything else is the same.”
His criticism goes beyond creative stagnation. He thinks the whole business model is unsustainable. “Taking several years with several thousand people… it’s absurd. It’s almost impossible,” he says. Gaming platforms have become “super expensive,” and he fires off a killer question: “Who can afford a ridiculously priced PC? No one.” His words hit home when you consider the rumors about the PS6’s price and the rising cost of components. For him, the future of entertainment isn’t consoles anymore, but artificial intelligence and communication between humans and digital personalities. Some of the signals he points to:
- Development budgets have become “huge” for creatively stagnant results
- PCs and consoles now cost as much as a car
- The rise of AI, which could make consoles obsolete
“For me, communication is the best entertainment,” he sums up. The man who invented the modern console now predicts its end. The question is whether the industry he built can reinvent itself before his prophecy comes true—or if it’ll keep polishing graphics in an ever-pricier gilded cage.
