Japan · Born 1950 · Sony · Hardware Engineer / Executive
Ken Kutaragi designed the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, creating the world's most successful game console platform, transforming Sony into a games company, and making the PlayStation brand the dominant force in consumer gaming for two console generations.
Ken Kutaragi joined Sony in 1975 as a hardware engineer and spent his early career in Sony's digital research division. His entry into game development occurred in the late 1980s through an unofficial project: Kutaragi had seen his daughter playing a Famicom and noted the limitations of its sound hardware relative to Sony's professional audio equipment. He approached Nintendo in secret — without Sony management approval — and proposed designing a sound chip for the Super Famicom. The result was the SPC700 audio processor in the SNES. Sony management learned of the project only after the chip was delivered; the project's success and the relationship it established with Nintendo gave Sony's leadership reason to tolerate his unconventional methods. The PlayStation's origin traces to a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom that Sony and Nintendo developed jointly in 1988–1992, with Kutaragi leading Sony's technical contribution. The famous 1991 Consumer Electronics Show incident — Nintendo announced a rival CD partnership with Philips the morning after Sony had announced its own Super Famicom CD player — terminated the collaboration publicly and dramatically. Sony, left with a completed CD-ROM game system and no partner, faced a choice: abandon the hardware or develop it into a standalone console. Kutaragi, convinced that games represented the future of consumer entertainment, advocated strongly for the latter. Sony's management agreed. The PlayStation (1994 in Japan, 1995 internationally) launched at $299 in the United States, underpricing the Sega Saturn by $100 at a time when the Saturn's hardware architecture made multiplatform development significantly harder. The PlayStation's developer-friendly SDK, its aggressive pricing, and its CD-ROM architecture drove market share into a dominant position: the console sold over 100 million units. Third-party support — especially the migration of Square's Final Fantasy franchise from Nintendo with Final Fantasy VII (1997) — was critical to this success. Kutaragi oversaw the PlayStation 2 (2000), which incorporated a DVD player that allowed Sony to win the DVD format war while maintaining its gaming market position. The PlayStation 2 sold over 155 million units — the best-selling console in history. He was promoted to Sony Computer Entertainment President in 1999 and to Sony Group Executive Deputy President in 2003. He retired from Sony in 2007, before the PlayStation 3's eventual commercial recovery from its difficult $599 launch price.