Ken Kutaragi (久夛良木 健), the Father of the PlayStation, has resigned his position as Chairman and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and will instead become Honorary Chairman. The resignation is effective June 19, 2007, when he will be replaced by the currect President and COO, Kazuo Hirai.
Kutaragi was responsible for the PlayStation, which debuted in December of 1994 in Japan, as well as the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the PlayStation 3. Lagging sales and other challenges facing the PlayStation 3 are thought to be the primary reason behind Kutaragi’s resignation.
Is PlayStation 3 to Blame?
Despite the PS3’s struggles, Kutaragi’s latest system is a top-notch entertainment and computing platform. Aside from the superior power it makes available for game developers to leverage, other uses for the PS3’s power have emerged, such as Folding@Home, which recently announced that the additional teraflops donated by PS3 owners has more than doubled its computing power.
Father of the PlayStation
In the late 1980s, Kutaragi was the early champion of video games at Sony, which at the time thought video games was simply a fad. He had worked, sometimes in secret, to build and provide components for Nintendo’s systems. After a heated contract dispute between Sony and Nintendo, a CD system (SNES-CD) under development by Kutaragi was kept in-house and became the original PlayStation. These early systems had a SNES cartridge port, which was eventually dropped before the official PlayStation release in 1994. Sony has sold over 100 million PlayStation units. (Contrast that to the 49 million SNES systems sold by Nintendo.)
His success led to the PlayStation 2 (more than 115 million sold), the PlayStation Portable (25 million sold), and the PlayStation 3 (3 million sold).
References
Sony PlayStation architect resigns
Sony unit chairman and CEO Kutaragi to step down
Ken Kutaragi Resigns, Weeping Heard in Solid Snake’s Condo
Tags: History · Industry News · PSP · Platforms · Playstation · Playstation2 · Playstation3
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