Shuhei Yoshida was in Bilbao at the weekend to receive the BIG Conference Honorary Award. During his panel he recalled how the deal with SquareSoft and Enix changed PSX's fortune in the 90s and also told Gamereactor how excited he is about PS VR2 and why. But the Japanese exec also shared his memories from his early days at Sony, and about how PlayStation was born:
"I joined Sony Corporation in 1986 straight out from college in Japan", Yoshida-san recalled as his very first job. "And at that time Sony was not making video games; Sony was making personal computers that played games and I was a huge video game fan and I was thinking maybe in the future Sony will make video games (laughs)."
"It just so happened that in [February] 1993, seven years after I joined Sony, I was called in by my former boss at Sony, that I should meet with this person named Ken Kutaragi", Yoshida reminisced on the then-unknown PSX mastermind. "At that time I was working in the PC department, business group, helping the Apple Computer. I don't know if you knew that, Sony made the first portable Macintosh called PowerBook 100, the smallest one, Sony designed and manufactured on behalf of Apple Computer. So I was in that group interfacing with Apple people, but because my former boss knew that I was a big video game fan, he wanted me to meet with Ken Kutaragi"
"At that time", he continued, "[Kutaragi-san] said 'I'm making a video game system as powerful as a Silicon Graphics workstation and I'm going to sell it under 500 dollars'. And I was like, 'wow, this person is lying (laughs). It's impossible!' But being proud I was like 'oh, Kutaragi-san, that's amazing!' So I went back fo my former boss and said, 'wow, Ken is a liar, isn't he?' And my former boss said 'no, I trust what Ken is saying'. And I said 'really? Can I join that group?' So it turned out it was an interview. And luckily I was able to join Ken's group. At that time Ken had only the engineers making the first PlayStation and I was the first non-technical person to join the team because at that time I didn't know that the company was trying to move Ken's project from the R&D stage to the actual business stage".
Naturally, Sony's engineers had to optimise resources, cut a few corners here and there, reduce resolution, and make the console efficient for gaming, so it wasn't a Silicon Graphics workstation precisely, but it became the company's first great success in video games.
What are your best memories from the the PSX, Saturn, and Nintendo 64 era?