Speaker 1: Welcome to text Tuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech, and it is time
Speaker 1: to continue our dive into the history and evolution of
Speaker 1: the PlayStation line of consoles. In our last episode in
Speaker 1: this series, which was the second one, I talked about
Speaker 1: how the success of the PS one led right into
Speaker 1: the even bigger success of the PS two. This is
Speaker 1: one of those rare cases where the sequel outperforms the original.
Speaker 1: The PlayStation two was a phenomenal success. I also talked
Speaker 1: about how the dual shock controller debut late into the
Speaker 1: life cycle of the PS one, and that the PS
Speaker 1: two version became the real basis for all dual shock
Speaker 1: style controllers moving for word with some exceptions. But I
Speaker 1: didn't spend any time talking about how those controllers actually work,
Speaker 1: so I thought I should give a moment to do
Speaker 1: that before we continue down the path of the history
Speaker 1: of the consoles. Because this is tech stuff, we do
Speaker 1: talk about how tech works. And besides, I like using
Speaker 1: these histories as a way to introduce people to different
Speaker 1: types of technologies. So the original PlayStation one controller did
Speaker 1: not have the analog thumbsticks. It had fourteen buttons, and
Speaker 1: those were the eight that I've already mentioned in the
Speaker 1: previous episode, the four direction buttons on the left side
Speaker 1: and the four action buttons on the right side. Can't
Speaker 1: wait for people to yell at me for calling something
Speaker 1: that was pink red or whatever. But I was looking
Speaker 1: at a really bad photo and I didn't have my
Speaker 1: PlayStation controller in front of me, and this just tells
Speaker 1: you I don't play the PlayStation very much anyway. The
Speaker 1: action that the buttons did all depended on the game.
Speaker 1: Right it might be a jump button or a weapon button,
Speaker 1: or it might have you speak or whatever. In between
Speaker 1: those two banks of buttons are a pair of buttons
Speaker 1: labeled start and select, and typically games would map these
Speaker 1: two functions like pause or an inventory button, or to
Speaker 1: back out of a menu or something similar to that. Then,
Speaker 1: on the back of the controller, or rather on the
Speaker 1: the side of the controller that faces the television. Some
Speaker 1: people call it the front of the controller, um, but anyway,
Speaker 1: it's facing the same way you are toward the TV.
Speaker 1: There are four shoulder buttons, two on the left and
Speaker 1: two on the right, mounted in a top button bottom configuration,
Speaker 1: and under each button inside the controller is a metal disc.
Speaker 1: Pressing on the button means that the button presses against
Speaker 1: the metal disc, which deforms, and a thin conductive strip
Speaker 1: that's mounted above a circuit board inside the controller is
Speaker 1: pushed so that it makes some contact with that circuit board,
Speaker 1: and that acts like an on switch in a regular
Speaker 1: old circuit. It completes a circuit. So when you press
Speaker 1: down on the button, you complete that circuit. You let
Speaker 1: current move through that particular path, and that sends a
Speaker 1: signal to the game system that that specific button has
Speaker 1: been pressed and that the game maps that to whatever
Speaker 1: input it's uh it's it's keyed to, so that your
Speaker 1: character or whatever in the game does whatever it is
Speaker 1: supposed to do. The PS two's dual shock two controllers
Speaker 1: introduced a new feature with those buttons. They were pressure sensitive,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't just that you could push the buttons,
Speaker 1: it was how you push the buttons that would determine
Speaker 1: actions in certain games. So game developers could actually design
Speaker 1: games in which the gameplay would change depending on how
Speaker 1: hard they pressed a button. So a game developer could
Speaker 1: program a game so that if you tapped on a button,
Speaker 1: you might do a little hop in the game, but
Speaker 1: pushing harder on the button would make your character do
Speaker 1: a full jump in the game. Or you could map
Speaker 1: a melee attack buttons so that if you tapped on it,
Speaker 1: you just give a little love tap to somebody, and
Speaker 1: if you held the button down nice and hard, you
Speaker 1: to really wallop them. So how did they do that
Speaker 1: from a tech perspective, Well, it's similar to what I
Speaker 1: already described, except when you push lightly on the button,
Speaker 1: only a small portion of that conductive strip would make
Speaker 1: contact with the circuit would be pressed down and make
Speaker 1: a light point of contact on the circuit. If you
Speaker 1: pressed harder than more of the conductive strip would make
Speaker 1: more of a contact with a circuit board, and the
Speaker 1: change in conductivity gets registered by the PS two. It's
Speaker 1: essentially metering them, it's measuring it. So the PS two
Speaker 1: is looking not just from a for a signal and
Speaker 1: where it's from, but how strong that signal is if
Speaker 1: you can think of it that way and then interprets
Speaker 1: that as the appropriate in game action. Now I should
Speaker 1: add that this is a feature that wouldn't last through
Speaker 1: all dual shock controllers after the dual Shock too, Sony
Speaker 1: would end up dropping this further down the line, and
Speaker 1: that caused some gamers frustration because it meant that if
Speaker 1: they were playing older games on newer consoles. Let's say
Speaker 1: you buy a new console that's got some backwards compatibility
Speaker 1: to it and you want to play an old game
Speaker 1: that had this capability build into it. Well, your current
Speaker 1: controller no longer has that function, so their game is
Speaker 1: somewhat hampered because of it. That's one of the risks
Speaker 1: of including new features in hardware, because further down the line,
Speaker 1: in a future iteration, you might drop that feature and
Speaker 1: you might lose some access to legacy software. This supplies
Speaker 1: not just to video game consoles, to everything really anyway.
Speaker 1: At that point, you could argue that some of those
Speaker 1: games would turn into abandoned ware because you couldn't play
Speaker 1: them properly. Getting back to the controller, the thumbsticks are
Speaker 1: analog and they rely on potentiometers, which in turn are
Speaker 1: variable resistors, and that means that these components create electrical
Speaker 1: resistance in a circuit. And these components are adjustable so
Speaker 1: that you can change the amount of electrical resistance that
Speaker 1: is applied and yeah, if you're like me, a sense
Speaker 1: like that doesn't necessarily clear stuff up right away, So
Speaker 1: let's break it all down. Resistance is what it sounds like.
Speaker 1: It describes how a particular material resists the flow of
Speaker 1: electricity through it. And it's kind of like friction. If
Speaker 1: you think of a surface, like a rough surface, having
Speaker 1: a lot of friction, trying to push something across it
Speaker 1: is really hard. Trying to push something across a very
Speaker 1: smooth surface is much easier. You still have friction, but
Speaker 1: not nearly as much. Well, the same is true with
Speaker 1: electrical conductivity. Conductive materials have some level of electrical resistance.
Speaker 1: Some of them allow electricity to pass through pretty easily
Speaker 1: and some don't. And like friction, typically the byproduct you get,
Speaker 1: you know, because you're losing that energy somehow. Energy cannot
Speaker 1: be created or destroyed, but it can be converted. Instead
Speaker 1: of that being electrical energy, you're losing it in the
Speaker 1: form of heat. So your electronics heat up because they're
Speaker 1: not perfect conductors. And uh so that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: a basic description of electrical resistance, and a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff can affect the resistance of a particular type of material.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't just say that copper has a
Speaker 1: specific electrical resistance, because things like the thickness of a
Speaker 1: copper wire can determine that the thinner a copper wire,
Speaker 1: the higher the resistance. So if you have a thick
Speaker 1: copper cable has a much lower electrical resistance than a
Speaker 1: thin copper wire. But also temperature can affect it. If
Speaker 1: you cool conductors down, then their resistance decreases. That's why
Speaker 1: things like the large Hadron collider have these super cooled
Speaker 1: elements to make super conductors, and those are conductors in
Speaker 1: which you don't lose any electrical energy at all to heat.
Speaker 1: They just what you put in is what's getting out
Speaker 1: the other side. Essentially, potentiometers are slightly different. They have
Speaker 1: components that let you adjust the amount of resistance that's
Speaker 1: in a circuit. You can turn it up or turn
Speaker 1: it down, and that allows you to control the amount
Speaker 1: of current flowing through a circuit, assuming you've got a
Speaker 1: constant voltage. And if you want to think about it
Speaker 1: in terms of pipes and water, a potentiometer is kind
Speaker 1: of like an adjustable valve that can either let more
Speaker 1: or less water through it. And I'm oversimplifying here just
Speaker 1: to kind of give you an analogy, but you get
Speaker 1: the point. So back to the controller. The thumbsticks on
Speaker 1: the dual shock controller have two potentiometers each, and they're
Speaker 1: under the controllers and they're mounted at right angles to
Speaker 1: one another. And the what happens is when you move
Speaker 1: the thumbstick, it changes the potentiometers slightly, and current flows
Speaker 1: through these at a steady rate. As you move the thumbstick,
Speaker 1: it changes the resistance in those potentiometers. And by monitoring
Speaker 1: the current flowing through these circuits, the PlayStation can determine
Speaker 1: the exact position of that thumbstick. So moving it one
Speaker 1: way might affect the electrical resistance of one of those
Speaker 1: two potentiometers and not the other. But owing that, the
Speaker 1: PlayStation knows which way the thumbstick was moved and exactly
Speaker 1: how far it was moved, because this is in degrees, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe you move it one way, both potentiometers increase the
Speaker 1: electrical resistance. You move it another way, both the potentiometers
Speaker 1: decrease the electrical resistance. All of this is invisible to
Speaker 1: the player. You know, we would not be aware of it,
Speaker 1: but this is how the PlayStation is able to determine
Speaker 1: exactly where the thumbstick is at any given moment, and
Speaker 1: it gives very precise controls to the player. So a
Speaker 1: game developer can create a game where you can have
Speaker 1: these very precise requirements for players to maneuver their characters through.
Speaker 1: It's really what allowed game developers to create that frame
Speaker 1: perfect kind of rage inducing platforming game that I am
Speaker 1: so bad at. Anyway, that's how the thumbsticks work, and
Speaker 1: it's all about converting that information into essentially a location
Speaker 1: on an X Y access. It's just the same as
Speaker 1: if you were to get a bunch of chart paper
Speaker 1: and you were to start plotting points on the chart.
Speaker 1: It's the same sort of thing. The points would represent
Speaker 1: the position of the thumbsticks. It's pretty neat and and
Speaker 1: I think it was a clever way to engineer these
Speaker 1: uh these thumbsticks in an analog way. Now, not all
Speaker 1: games support this feature, right Like some games might have
Speaker 1: it where you have a character and if you push
Speaker 1: the thumbstick a little bit, your character starts to creep
Speaker 1: across the screen, and if you push the thumbstick all
Speaker 1: the way to its stopping point, then your character will
Speaker 1: break out into a run. But some games take a
Speaker 1: more digital approach, meaning it's either happening or it's not happening.
Speaker 1: So if you push the thumbstick a little or a lot,
Speaker 1: your character moves the same either way that that sometimes happens.
Speaker 1: That's that's sort of a good way of understanding the
Speaker 1: difference between digital and analog. Analog is a is a
Speaker 1: nice smooth curve, right, it's it's degrees, it's uh, you're
Speaker 1: moving in a nice smooth motion from one state to another.
Speaker 1: Dig All is much more step like. It's either on
Speaker 1: or off, or it's in steps, so it has a
Speaker 1: discrete amount that is added with each step. It's not
Speaker 1: something that's a smooth curve. Now, you can have lots
Speaker 1: of tiny little steps, and if you have enough tiny
Speaker 1: little steps, you can simulate a smooth curve. But in reality,
Speaker 1: if you were to zoom weigh in, you would see
Speaker 1: it's more like a staircase, not a not an unbroken
Speaker 1: curve the way analog is. Then there's the vibrating component
Speaker 1: to the dual shot controller and this works the same
Speaker 1: way vibrating motors work and stuff like cell phones, and
Speaker 1: it's pretty simple gun electric motor or in the case
Speaker 1: of a dual shot controller, you actually have two electric motors.
Speaker 1: They're both in the base on either side of the
Speaker 1: controller where your your hands go, and on the shaft
Speaker 1: of this electric motor is a slightly offset unbalanced weight,
Speaker 1: and so as the shaft spins, that unbalanced weight causes
Speaker 1: some wobble in the electric motor. Except the electric motor
Speaker 1: is actually firmly mounted inside the controller, it can't wobble
Speaker 1: because it's mounted to a larger structure. However, that wobble
Speaker 1: then gets transmitted to the controller as a whole as
Speaker 1: this sort of vibrating, buzzing thing. And that's where that
Speaker 1: technology comes from as how it works, and it's used
Speaker 1: in all sorts of stuff like cell phones, for example,
Speaker 1: have these If you have a cellphone with a vibrate function,
Speaker 1: that's what's happening. So let's jump back to the PS
Speaker 1: two now. As I mentioned in the last episode, the
Speaker 1: PS two had a phenomenal launch and it would go
Speaker 1: on to become the best selling home console of all
Speaker 1: time as of the recording of this podcast, And in
Speaker 1: case you're wondering, second place would go to the Nintendo
Speaker 1: d S handheld system. And even that's about a million
Speaker 1: units behind the PlayStation two. Pretty phenomenal, especially when you
Speaker 1: look at the you know, the expense of both of
Speaker 1: those consoles, and the fact that the handheld one being portable,
Speaker 1: has its own level of of pros and cons to it.
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the previous episode that Sony did not
Speaker 1: jump on the internet bandwagon right away. Back during the
Speaker 1: original PlayStation days, Sony did introduce a link cable that
Speaker 1: would let players link to PlayStation systems together for network play.
Speaker 1: You could do system to system play. However, that also
Speaker 1: required both of these consoles to be connected to their
Speaker 1: own respective television sets, so you would need to PS
Speaker 1: ones and two televisions to make this work, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't capable of connecting online. The PS two initially didn't
Speaker 1: come out with any way to connect to the internet either. Instead,
Speaker 1: two years after they launched the system, Sony released a
Speaker 1: modem as a peripheral most of the PlayStation two models,
Speaker 1: and keep in mind there were a lot of different
Speaker 1: PlayStation two models. You can say PlayStation two and you've
Speaker 1: got the same basic idea of what it is, but
Speaker 1: there are a lot of variations. The company would refine
Speaker 1: the design and production largely in an effort to streamline
Speaker 1: things and also to cut down on costs over the
Speaker 1: entire course of the life cycle of PlayStation two. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the original ones had an expansion bay on the back
Speaker 1: of the console. So if you looked at the back
Speaker 1: of the console, you would see that there was a cover,
Speaker 1: and you could take the cover off and it would
Speaker 1: remove that cover to the bay. You could see the bay.
Speaker 1: It was a compartment that was large enough to hold
Speaker 1: a hard drive. Sony would also introduce hard drives that
Speaker 1: you could purchase in addition to the base console, and
Speaker 1: it also had a port that the cover would cover up.
Speaker 1: Sony offered up a network adapter, which in North America
Speaker 1: had a phone jack and an Ethernet port on it.
Speaker 1: Everywhere else pretty much just stuck with the Ethernet port
Speaker 1: and it would fit on the back of the console.
Speaker 1: It would just plug directly into that that port, that
Speaker 1: outlet I had talked about a second ago in the
Speaker 1: back of the PS two. It did not fill up
Speaker 1: the bay. It just covered up the bay. However, if
Speaker 1: you wanted to get a hard drive, you would need
Speaker 1: the network adapter and the hard drive. You would connect
Speaker 1: the hard drive to the network adapter. Then you would
Speaker 1: slide the hard drive into the bay. It would be
Speaker 1: nestled in there. The network adapter would plug into the
Speaker 1: outlet in the PS two, so the network adapter acted
Speaker 1: as its own outlet for the hard drive. You couldn't
Speaker 1: just bypass it. There were third party companies that would
Speaker 1: make a type of UH plug that essentially acted like
Speaker 1: the network adapter, except it didn't have a network adapter
Speaker 1: in it. It was just the plug so that you
Speaker 1: could use your own hard drive. But that's another story.
Speaker 1: But now you could have online capabilities after running a
Speaker 1: special startup disc that is in your PS two, and
Speaker 1: you could play games online, certain ones, very few not
Speaker 1: only if you had online capability, the hard drive would
Speaker 1: let the PS to load more game data into the
Speaker 1: memory area. Essentially, it was acting like memory and it
Speaker 1: would bring loading times down during game play, and it
Speaker 1: could also be used as a memory card. You could
Speaker 1: store saves to the hard drive, for example. Some enterprising
Speaker 1: gamers even figured out how to load full games onto
Speaker 1: the hard drive using this system, and that removed the
Speaker 1: need to have a disk to run certain games. It
Speaker 1: also circumvented copy part action, so that would become something
Speaker 1: of a headache for Sony down the line, but not
Speaker 1: many people did it. The people who knew how to
Speaker 1: do it, we're doing it like crazy, but but that
Speaker 1: was a small percentage of the overall population. The PS
Speaker 1: two would also feature an innovation that Sony would build
Speaker 1: on later, and that would be the Eye Toy, and
Speaker 1: that debut in two thousand three. The Eye Toy was
Speaker 1: essentially a webcam. You would set it on your television
Speaker 1: or a shell or whatever. You plug it into the
Speaker 1: PS two. You would have to adjust the focus manually.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to actually turn the lens to
Speaker 1: get it and focus. And you could play certain games
Speaker 1: through motion capture technology. One of my friends is actually
Speaker 1: married to a guy who worked on the Eye Toy
Speaker 1: back in the day, so I got to hear all
Speaker 1: about it back when it was first launching. That was
Speaker 1: pretty cool. A typical Eye Toy game would actually put
Speaker 1: you in the middle of the action. You would see
Speaker 1: a video image of yourself on the television. Your image
Speaker 1: was captured by the Eye Toy, and so as you
Speaker 1: would flail around on the screen, you would get attacked
Speaker 1: by flying monkeys or whatever. So you'd swatted stuff that
Speaker 1: you saw on the sreen and UH that's how gameplay
Speaker 1: typically would unfold. The Eye Toy also featured a microphone
Speaker 1: so it could pick up voice commands, so again it's
Speaker 1: a little prescient. This was years before Microsoft would introduce
Speaker 1: the Connect that wouldn't come out until The Eye Toy
Speaker 1: wasn't quite as sophisticated as the Connect. That's putting it lightly,
Speaker 1: but many of the same design concepts applied to both
Speaker 1: pieces of hardware. Both have cameras and software or firmware.
Speaker 1: They could interpret your movements as input commands for games,
Speaker 1: and both were you could argue, criminally undersupported. Games using
Speaker 1: the Sony Eye Toy were few and far between. From
Speaker 1: what I can tell, there were a fewer than thirty
Speaker 1: titles that actually required the Eye Toy, and only eight
Speaker 1: of those were ever available in the United States. There
Speaker 1: were some other games that included eye toy support so
Speaker 1: as an option, not a requirement, but those were more
Speaker 1: like games that had some added features. They weren't created
Speaker 1: with the Eye Toy experience mind, and most of those
Speaker 1: games would end up being really similar most of the
Speaker 1: Eye toy games that you could buy, they were all
Speaker 1: like variations on the same themes like rhythm games that
Speaker 1: would require you to reach towards certain points around you
Speaker 1: on a timed beat, so kind of like Beat Saber,
Speaker 1: but on a very primitive level. Or there might be
Speaker 1: a fighting game where you're you know, moving your arms around,
Speaker 1: flailing wildly trying to fight off a boxer or martial
Speaker 1: arts opponent. You know, the details changed from game to game,
Speaker 1: but the basic gameplay was really similar across the board.
Speaker 1: Microsoft would go through its own kind of the same
Speaker 1: story with the Connect years later, and also the Second
Speaker 1: Connect even after that, but that's a different story. Another
Speaker 1: game type debuted on the PS two and that required
Speaker 1: a peripheral and that would be singing games. Harmonics was
Speaker 1: the first to do this with Karaoke Revolution in two
Speaker 1: thousand three, which shipped with a Logitech headset that included
Speaker 1: a microphone. Later, game like sing Star would launch with
Speaker 1: a handheld USB mic or a pair of them, and
Speaker 1: you could plug them into the PS two, and both
Speaker 1: games had players try to match the pitch of a
Speaker 1: song that's indicated on screen. The closer you were to
Speaker 1: being on pitch, the higher your score would be. Harmonics
Speaker 1: would follow this up in two thousand five with Guitar
Speaker 1: Hero and the iconic guitar shaped controller that debuted on
Speaker 1: the PS two. So a lot of very innovative style
Speaker 1: games were starting to make their first appearance on the
Speaker 1: PS two, and that really helped the console as well.
Speaker 1: They had tons of iconic games from established developers as
Speaker 1: well as uh. They were acting like a platform where
Speaker 1: you could find some really interesting or downright weird games
Speaker 1: from more obscure companies and developers, and that mix would
Speaker 1: be something that Sony would foster throughout the life cycle
Speaker 1: of the console and beyond. I'll talk more about them
Speaker 1: in a little bit later, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: i'll wrap up with the PS two, and then we'll
Speaker 1: start to look at the console that would follow in
Speaker 1: its footsteps by taking some pretty drastic changes to the model.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. So the PS
Speaker 1: two saw incredible success, that's loving it. Lightly huge games
Speaker 1: like God of War got their start on the PS two.
Speaker 1: Grand Theft Auto three, which, while it was the third
Speaker 1: entry in a series, took a game that had previously
Speaker 1: been a top down view game you were looking at
Speaker 1: the world from above and you would control a car
Speaker 1: that way. They switched it to a third person style game.
Speaker 1: They helped launch the sandbox game genre, not that it
Speaker 1: was the first or only one of its type, but
Speaker 1: it was one of the most popular ones, and it
Speaker 1: got a lot of other game developers getting into that
Speaker 1: realm of game, and we've seen so many since then.
Speaker 1: Shadow of the Colossus was a game that gave people
Speaker 1: who argued the video games are a form of art.
Speaker 1: They gave them a lot of momentum because that game
Speaker 1: is gorgeous. The Final Fantasy series continued to dominate on
Speaker 1: the PS two. Ratchett and Clank became a franchise on
Speaker 1: the PS two. The series would go on through many
Speaker 1: future generations of the PlayStation console. Katamari Demassi was one
Speaker 1: of the stranger games for the console that got mainstream support.
Speaker 1: So if you don't know what that game is, you
Speaker 1: are in charge of rolling around a little sticky ball
Speaker 1: that picks up stuff in game environments. The ball gets
Speaker 1: bigger as you do it, and you pick up bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger stuff. And it's also that you can rebuild
Speaker 1: the cosmos because your dad done blowed it up real
Speaker 1: good by accident. There are literally hundreds of popular titles
Speaker 1: on the PS two that either got their start there
Speaker 1: or they found incredible success there, and justice Sony had
Speaker 1: done with the PS one, the company would continue to
Speaker 1: support the PS two long after introducing the next generation
Speaker 1: of PlayStation. The PS two would be in production well
Speaker 1: into the life cycle of the p S three. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm to say it was about eleven or
Speaker 1: twelve year life cycle. That's an incredible run, and people
Speaker 1: were still buying PS two's and PS two games well
Speaker 1: after the PS three had hit the shelves. But now
Speaker 1: it's time to kind of switch over to the PS three.
Speaker 1: And this one is a really complicated story, largely because
Speaker 1: of some controversial decisions in the design process. Now these
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily bad decisions, mind you, but Kudaragi, that's the
Speaker 1: father of the PlayStation kin Kudaraki and his team had
Speaker 1: made some choices that would present some unique challenges to developers.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand five, Microsoft releases its second console,
Speaker 1: the Xbox three sixty, and that opened up the seventh
Speaker 1: generation of consoles, era, the three six. He got a
Speaker 1: head start on both Sony and Nintendo. Both of them
Speaker 1: would release their competing consoles, the PS three and we, respectively,
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six the fall of two thousand six,
Speaker 1: so Microsoft had kind of an open playing field to
Speaker 1: really establish itself for almost a full year. Now, if
Speaker 1: you've listened to the previous episodes in this series, you
Speaker 1: know that each generation of video game consoles has its
Speaker 1: own defining characteristics. The third generation of video game consoles
Speaker 1: was the eight bit gaming system era, the original Nintendo.
Speaker 1: In other words, the fourth generation was a sixteen bit
Speaker 1: system like the Super Nintendo. The next generation, the fifth generation,
Speaker 1: was the thirty two bit era. The sixth generation was
Speaker 1: sometimes called bit era, but that was about when we
Speaker 1: were finally getting away from using raw processing power as
Speaker 1: a way to describe consoles because it became less important,
Speaker 1: and we started to see this. In fact, we continue
Speaker 1: to see this where the hardware advances to a point
Speaker 1: where the the real differentiators lie not necessarily in the
Speaker 1: processing power, but in other ways that the console sense games.
Speaker 1: So the seventh generation saw the consoles diverging even more
Speaker 1: than they had before. On the Microsoft side, the Xbox
Speaker 1: three sixty would really emphasize HD video games and online
Speaker 1: play with the Xbox Live service. That was kind of
Speaker 1: the bet they were they were placing uh that sort
Speaker 1: of became. The defining features for the Xbox three sixty
Speaker 1: were the HD video gaming for an HD era and
Speaker 1: this online play approach. The Nintendo we marked Nintendo's decision
Speaker 1: to focus not on traditional stuff like graphics, but instead
Speaker 1: innovating in control systems like the we mote and the
Speaker 1: we pad and new forms of gameplay. That was really
Speaker 1: where they were backing. Sony's PS three was going with
Speaker 1: really incredible processing power. Plus it included a Blu ray player,
Speaker 1: which meant, just as the PS two would become a
Speaker 1: DVD player with benefits for a lot of people, the
Speaker 1: PS three would do the same for Blu ray. When
Speaker 1: Blu ray players first came out, they were more than
Speaker 1: a thousand bucks, so when the PS three first came out,
Speaker 1: it was pretty expensive to It's like six hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't cheap, but it meant that if you
Speaker 1: were in the market for a Blu ray player, you
Speaker 1: might think of a PS three because it could also
Speaker 1: play games, just like the PS two could also play
Speaker 1: DVDs as well as games, So maybe that was a
Speaker 1: deciding factor for a lot of people. Also, Sony had
Speaker 1: a big advantage over this because the company was behind
Speaker 1: Blu ray player technology, and Microsoft being a competitor, it
Speaker 1: would have been really hard to get that licensing agreement
Speaker 1: to get a Blu ray player into a three sixty.
Speaker 1: That was a real sticking point. Oh and also, the
Speaker 1: PS three would feature a radically different processing architecture that
Speaker 1: had a ton of potential but threw up more than
Speaker 1: a few boundaries for developers. So the CPU was no
Speaker 1: longer the fabled Emotion Engine, although the early versions of
Speaker 1: the p S three still retained Emotion engine chips. Instead,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the Cell processor, which in turn was
Speaker 1: a short way of saying the full name Cell Broadband
Speaker 1: Engine architecture. The processor was a joint project between Sony,
Speaker 1: Tshiba and IBM, and they called their partnership S T
Speaker 1: I for short, the first letter of each of their
Speaker 1: company names. The Cell is a multi core processor, something
Speaker 1: that's common these days, but was fairly new to the
Speaker 1: console world. It had been around for PCs for a while,
Speaker 1: but it was new for consoles. So what the heck
Speaker 1: is a multi core processor? Well, I've talked about these
Speaker 1: a lot in previous episodes, but it's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite analogies. So we're gonna do it again, gosh darn it.
Speaker 1: So think of cp us like they are math students.
Speaker 1: These are microprocessors, but imagine that they are math students. Now,
Speaker 1: let's say you've got a really powerful single core prod assessor,
Speaker 1: and we're going to represent that by a super smart
Speaker 1: math student. Maybe she can solve complex equations in a
Speaker 1: third of the time of her fellow students. Then let's
Speaker 1: say we've got a multi core processor. This means we
Speaker 1: have a processor on a single chip, but as multiple
Speaker 1: units that each can process operations. They can do their
Speaker 1: own tasks, and they all do work pretty well. But individually,
Speaker 1: none of them are as good as that single souped
Speaker 1: up single core right there. None of them are as
Speaker 1: powerful as that single core CPU. But they each of
Speaker 1: the of these multi core ones are good. They're just
Speaker 1: not great. This would be like a small group of
Speaker 1: smart math students. They're not as brilliant as the young
Speaker 1: woman who solves complicated problems in a flash. And let's
Speaker 1: say that this is a quad core processor. So we
Speaker 1: have four cores. We've got four bright math students in
Speaker 1: this analogy. Now, if you were to give the same
Speaker 1: math problem to the gene yes, single core student and
Speaker 1: the four very smart but not as genius quad core
Speaker 1: students and then tim them. The single core would win out.
Speaker 1: The single core would finish the math problem first. She'd
Speaker 1: solve it the fastest. But let's say you hand out
Speaker 1: a quiz and the quiz has four math problems on it,
Speaker 1: and you tell the single core student that she has
Speaker 1: to solve all four problems. But you look at the
Speaker 1: four bright students, the quad core group, and you say
Speaker 1: each of them has to solve one problem on that
Speaker 1: four problems tests, so they divide it up. Each student
Speaker 1: takes a different problem. In that case, you would expect
Speaker 1: the group of four students to finish first. They're not
Speaker 1: brilliant like the first student, but they're smart, and they're
Speaker 1: each only having to solve one fourth of the overall test.
Speaker 1: That is sort of how multi core processors work. They're
Speaker 1: good at what is called parallel processing. That's when you
Speaker 1: have different processors tackling different operations all at the same time.
Speaker 1: And this only really works if the type of operations
Speaker 1: you're asking for it to do can be divided up
Speaker 1: like that. So if you need to do a single
Speaker 1: big task and there's no way to break up that
Speaker 1: big task into smaller tasks. Multi cores don't have an
Speaker 1: advantage because the work can't be divvied up between them,
Speaker 1: But if the task can be separated into several different processes,
Speaker 1: then each core can take on a different part of
Speaker 1: that and the whole effort takes less time. And most
Speaker 1: of the processing that we work on tends to be
Speaker 1: in that category. Not all of it, but most of it.
Speaker 1: The cell processor in the PS three had two hundred
Speaker 1: thirty four million transistors on its spread across essentially nine
Speaker 1: processing chips. At the time, that was a big deal.
Speaker 1: On top of the line PC CPU from Intel would
Speaker 1: sport two hundred million transistors, and it would also set
Speaker 1: you back a cool thousand buck in the US when
Speaker 1: the PS three debuted in two thousand six. These days, though,
Speaker 1: companies like Intel rarely advertised the number of transistors on
Speaker 1: a chip. But we are easily in the billions range,
Speaker 1: like three to seven billion transistors on a single chip.
Speaker 1: We have left the millions far far behind. But again,
Speaker 1: back in two thousand five when they first unveiled the
Speaker 1: PS three, and then two thousand and six when it
Speaker 1: became available for purchase, this was incredible technology. The approach
Speaker 1: st I took in designing the cell was really interesting
Speaker 1: as well. So at the center of the PS three
Speaker 1: cell was a power PC microchip with a clock speed
Speaker 1: of three point two giga hurts. You can listen to
Speaker 1: my earlier episodes about the PlayStation to hear more about
Speaker 1: what clock speed means. The chip had its own five
Speaker 1: D and twelve kilobytes of RAM or random acxis memory,
Speaker 1: and the chip kind of acts like a supervisor. Its
Speaker 1: main job is to assign tasks to the eight coprocessors
Speaker 1: on the same CPU chip and actively. These are all
Speaker 1: called the synergistic processing elements or SPEs. So you've got
Speaker 1: a boss who takes in assignments and then parcels out
Speaker 1: those assignments to each of his direct reports, will say,
Speaker 1: and the direct reports are the sps. So the power
Speaker 1: PC core a k a. The power processing element or
Speaker 1: PPE in this system looks at what jobs need to
Speaker 1: be done. It looks at what the cores in the
Speaker 1: synergistic processing elements are already doing. Right, is anyone busy?
Speaker 1: Are there people who have availability? And then the PPE
Speaker 1: that power PC core assigns jobs to available processors. It says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: the process or number three is available, so I'll send
Speaker 1: this job to process or three. And we're getting to
Speaker 1: the real crux of what the PS three was all
Speaker 1: about from the perspective of its creator, Ken Kutaragi. Now,
Speaker 1: past episodes, you've heard me talk about Kutaragi leading the
Speaker 1: charge in Sony getting into the video game console business.
Speaker 1: He argued that it was something they definitely wanted to do,
Speaker 1: and no one really was giving him much attention about it.
Speaker 1: But as passionately as he argued about this stuff, it
Speaker 1: didn't mean that he was really that interested in video games.
Speaker 1: He saw it as an engineering challenge and a market opportunity,
Speaker 1: and also as a way that he can make his
Speaker 1: mark in the company and rise in the ranks. The
Speaker 1: cell architecture wasn't just about making the next generation game console.
Speaker 1: Ken Karagi's long term goal was to create a hardware
Speaker 1: architecture for all sorts of products moving forward. The PS
Speaker 1: three would be the first consumer electronics product to feature it,
Speaker 1: but the idea would be he would use this same
Speaker 1: architecture in all sorts of Sony products. It would be
Speaker 1: a stepping stone to even bigger things that would perhaps
Speaker 1: even put him on track for leading the entire company,
Speaker 1: all of Sony, not just Sony Computer Entertainment, which is
Speaker 1: where he was he was current Lee uh serving as
Speaker 1: the president, but to lead Sony overall the Sony corporation.
Speaker 1: So this was a really big deal for him, and
Speaker 1: the processor was super powerful for the time, and since
Speaker 1: that debut there have been a few other computer systems
Speaker 1: that have taken advantage of that architecture. The cell design
Speaker 1: emphasized speed and a reduction in latency. A latency is
Speaker 1: the lag we experience between when we submit an input
Speaker 1: and when we get an output. Generally speaking, the simpler
Speaker 1: the application and the simpler the machine, the lower the
Speaker 1: latency tends to be. So if you're working with something
Speaker 1: like a standard calculator, which by design only accepts limited
Speaker 1: kinds of input, and you do some simple arithmetic on it,
Speaker 1: you get results that are to us instantaneous, you can't
Speaker 1: even detect a delay. But as software gets more complex
Speaker 1: and requires greater amounts of processing power, stuff can slow
Speaker 1: them down. So in some applications this can be irritating
Speaker 1: and others it can be dangerous. High latency in a
Speaker 1: standard video game is frustrating latency in a virtual reality
Speaker 1: game can be disorienting and cause motion sickness. You know.
Speaker 1: That's like if you turn your head in real life
Speaker 1: but your point of view in the game lags behind.
Speaker 1: That can make you feel really sick to your stomach.
Speaker 1: I speak from personal experience. Laten seeing something like an
Speaker 1: autonomous car would be deadly well. In addition to these processors,
Speaker 1: the VS three also boasted a graphics processing unit or GPU,
Speaker 1: called the Reality Synthesizer or or SX. This was developed
Speaker 1: in a partnership with Nvidia, a company that's famous sports
Speaker 1: g p U s and the RSX was similar in
Speaker 1: design to the Nvidia G Force line of processors. This
Speaker 1: one chip had three hundred million transistors on it, so
Speaker 1: even more than the CPU did, but it operated at
Speaker 1: a much lower clock speed at five fifty mega hurts.
Speaker 1: Unlike the PS two, the p S three came with
Speaker 1: an Ethernet port as a standard feature rather than as
Speaker 1: an add on peripheral. However, originally it was supposed to
Speaker 1: have three Ethernet ports when it was first announced. When
Speaker 1: it debuted, that had been whittled down to one. It
Speaker 1: supported Bluetooth two point oh, and it had an optical
Speaker 1: audio output. I'll have to talk about optical audio in
Speaker 1: some future episode. It also had four USB ports for
Speaker 1: other accessories. It had an HDMI output to go to
Speaker 1: a television. It was actually supposed to have two of them,
Speaker 1: but that got whittled down too. And it also had
Speaker 1: composite component and s video ports. And since we're on
Speaker 1: the subject, why not explain what those are really quickly?
Speaker 1: Or were? Most people these days wouldn't use them. H
Speaker 1: d M I is really the standard way to hook
Speaker 1: up a television to other components. But back in the
Speaker 1: day we had a whole smorgage board of options. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna go from most primitive to most advanced. So
Speaker 1: that means we start with composite cables. These cables are
Speaker 1: yellow video cable and they're typically bundled with a red
Speaker 1: and a white cable. But the red and white cables
Speaker 1: aren't video. Those are audio channels. They actually carry audio
Speaker 1: to stereo channels to the left stereo and the right
Speaker 1: stereo channels. The yellow cable carries a video signal and
Speaker 1: these cables are limited to standard definition resolution all in
Speaker 1: one channel on the cable, so all the all the
Speaker 1: data is in one channel of information. So this gives
Speaker 1: you the lowest resolution, the lowest uh color representation, Like
Speaker 1: it's it's the lowest quality of all the different options.
Speaker 1: Next up, we have the S video cable now that
Speaker 1: would carry two channels of video information. It's separated the
Speaker 1: colors from black and white, so you got black and
Speaker 1: white and one channel and all the other colors in
Speaker 1: another channel, and that would create a better image quality
Speaker 1: than composite video. However, like composite, S video cable was
Speaker 1: limited to standard definition signals of four A d I
Speaker 1: or five seventy six I for some markets. Then you've
Speaker 1: got component video cables. These cables were red, green, and blue,
Speaker 1: and they represented the three colors used to create all
Speaker 1: colors in video. However, they didn't each carry, you know,
Speaker 1: their respective colors. The red didn't carry red, the blue
Speaker 1: didn't carry blue, and the green didn't carry green. One
Speaker 1: cable carried luminants or brightness information, and the other two
Speaker 1: carried information about the hue of colors that should appear
Speaker 1: on screen. And through combinations of all of those elements,
Speaker 1: you could get a really wide range of colors displayed
Speaker 1: on screen and brightness as well. And you could also
Speaker 1: get up to high definition levels of resolution up to
Speaker 1: ten A d I. So this was finally getting into
Speaker 1: the h D side of things. H d M I,
Speaker 1: or high Definition Multimedia Interface, can carry uncompressed video and
Speaker 1: audio to the other elements. I just talked about composite
Speaker 1: component and s video. None of those carried audio. You
Speaker 1: would need separate audio cables to get sound from the
Speaker 1: PlayStation into your entertainment system. HDMI cables can carry both
Speaker 1: video and audio to the same source, so they are
Speaker 1: UH superior in that respect. There's a whole thing I
Speaker 1: could go in about UH with copy protection that relates
Speaker 1: to which cables would get supported or would lose support
Speaker 1: over time, but that's a topic for a future episode. Anyway,
Speaker 1: h d m I, or High Definition Multimedia Interface is
Speaker 1: now essentially the standard we use to connect things together
Speaker 1: for video game consoles, DVD players, that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: two televisions. So the p S three was the first
Speaker 1: of the PlayStations to have an HDMI port. Now, the
Speaker 1: combination of the cell processor and the GPU made the
Speaker 1: PS three a truly intimidating console. On paper, it clearly
Speaker 1: overshadowed the Xbox three sixty and the we wasn't even
Speaker 1: in the same weight class. But that's on paper. In reality,
Speaker 1: Sony would see PS three sales get off to a
Speaker 1: slow start and trail behind the Xbox three sixty, and
Speaker 1: even the we that would launch like a week after
Speaker 1: the PS three would end up beating the PS three
Speaker 1: in sales in many markets. So why is that? Why
Speaker 1: was the successor to the greatest selling video game console
Speaker 1: of all time more of a slow burn? While I'll
Speaker 1: tell you after we take a quick break. So kim
Speaker 1: Kutaragi made his big move setting up the CPU system
Speaker 1: for the PS three to be the foundation for a
Speaker 1: new generation of electronics and computer systems at Sony. That
Speaker 1: didn't turn out so well. And it's not because the
Speaker 1: tech wasn't good. For one thing, the new design required
Speaker 1: hundreds of engineers working primarily in Austin, Texas, and getting
Speaker 1: it right was challenging, so the project hit some delays,
Speaker 1: and that in turn made Sony have to push back
Speaker 1: the PS three's launched by about half a year, which
Speaker 1: gave Microsoft a lot more time to really entrench the
Speaker 1: three sixty as the definitive seventh generation game console, at
Speaker 1: least for a while. PS three sales would ultimately eclipse Microsoft,
Speaker 1: but it took some doing to make matters more complicated.
Speaker 1: Nintendo launched the Wii console shortly after the PS three debut,
Speaker 1: and at first a lot of people were ready to
Speaker 1: dismiss the Wei. The name struck many as being laughable.
Speaker 1: The console clearly didn't emphasize graphics or realistic gameplay, but
Speaker 1: nintendo strategy was to take aim at casual gamers, at
Speaker 1: non gamers, maybe people who had been gamers but they
Speaker 1: hadn't really played any video games and years those kind
Speaker 1: of folks weren't really being marketed to, and Nintendo saw
Speaker 1: an opportunity and people flocked to buy the Wii. It
Speaker 1: would lead to shortages and stores, so competition was stiff
Speaker 1: against Sony even when it launched. On top of that,
Speaker 1: Sony had to do some quick backtracking after receiving a
Speaker 1: powerfully negative reaction when going off the PS three and
Speaker 1: its new controller at E three two five, so this
Speaker 1: is one year before the console was to launch. The
Speaker 1: new PS three controller looked radically different from the basic
Speaker 1: design introduced with the PS one and refined into the
Speaker 1: dual shock form factor. UH. It had all the same
Speaker 1: buttons as those controllers, but it was a totally different shape.
Speaker 1: It was a Boomerang shape and still have the two thumbsticks,
Speaker 1: still had all the old buttons. But this shape caught
Speaker 1: people off guard, and a lot of people had a
Speaker 1: very strong negative reaction to it. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: meant so that you could hold either end of the
Speaker 1: PlayStation easily in your hands. Uh. At the E three presentations,
Speaker 1: Kutaragi really didn't say anything about the controllers. They never
Speaker 1: got an official name to the public, and the fan
Speaker 1: reaction was pretty brutal. So Sony made the call to
Speaker 1: scrap the Boomerang controller and to build out a new
Speaker 1: game pad modeled on the more standard duel shock form factor,
Speaker 1: so the Boomerang never even to consumer stores. Instead, Sony
Speaker 1: would introduce a controller called the six Axis, and it
Speaker 1: was called this because it included accelerometers inside the controller
Speaker 1: that could pick up movement along the X, y, and
Speaker 1: Z axes, and that allows for six degrees of freedom
Speaker 1: of motion, so the controller could detect when and how
Speaker 1: it was moving, which in turn could be leveraged by
Speaker 1: game developers. So you know, if you designed a game
Speaker 1: with this in mind, you could create one where let's
Speaker 1: say it's a survival horror game, you know, saying like
Speaker 1: Resident Evil, and it's got stealth based mechanics in it
Speaker 1: where you need to be really quiet and sneaky so
Speaker 1: that the bad guys don't see you. And if you
Speaker 1: were to move too much while holding the controller as
Speaker 1: you're trying to sneak around, your character in the game
Speaker 1: would give away their position. You know, they'd stumble, or
Speaker 1: they'd make noise or something and they would become a
Speaker 1: target for some sort of clever wielding pumpkin monster or something.
Speaker 1: One thing the six Access controller didn't have besides the
Speaker 1: boom ring shape, was a rumble feature. A lawsuit that
Speaker 1: was between Sony and a company called Immersion had led
Speaker 1: to Sony temporarily at least stripping the vibrating motors out
Speaker 1: of the six Excess controllers, so the controllers that launched
Speaker 1: with the PS three did not have haptic feedback. The
Speaker 1: six Excess controller would be the official controller for the
Speaker 1: PS three for just two years, when the company would
Speaker 1: then replace it with the dual Shock three. I'll probably
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit more in the next episode,
Speaker 1: but the controller wasn't the really big problem that Sony
Speaker 1: faced with the PS three, It really was that the
Speaker 1: architecture of that CPU was so different from what video
Speaker 1: game developers were used to. It took time a lot
Speaker 1: of time for game developers to really make titles that
Speaker 1: tapped into the PS three's capabilities. Essentially, developing games for
Speaker 1: the p S three was hard. Specifically leveraging those sp
Speaker 1: s that those eight co processors effectively was not easy
Speaker 1: to do. According to one developer, creating a Hello World message,
Speaker 1: which is typically one of the first things any programmer
Speaker 1: does when they're learning, you know, how to code for
Speaker 1: any given system. Typically that would require three to five
Speaker 1: lines of code for most systems, but to have one
Speaker 1: spe processor you take this request and follow it through
Speaker 1: would require an incredible one hundred forty four lines of code.
Speaker 1: Sony even took some amount of pride in this. They
Speaker 1: essentially said, it all boils down to nothing worth having
Speaker 1: is ever easy. So they said, yeah, it's hard to
Speaker 1: program for this thing, but this thing is super powerful,
Speaker 1: so it's worth it. The design of those co processors
Speaker 1: made coding for them really hard to do, and using
Speaker 1: them effectively would be a big challenge. So many of
Speaker 1: the early games weren't great at showing off the PS
Speaker 1: three's true potential because they couldn't tap into that processing power.
Speaker 1: On top of that, many game develop helpers were creating
Speaker 1: games that would be available on multiple platforms, right cross
Speaker 1: platform game titles. Typically that involves a core design team
Speaker 1: that are building out a game for specific platform, maybe
Speaker 1: the PC, maybe an Xbox whatever, and then they poured
Speaker 1: it over to other platforms. So many titles that were
Speaker 1: already available for the Xbox three sixty we're going through
Speaker 1: this porting process to the PS three. But due to
Speaker 1: that complexity in the p S three's design, the developers
Speaker 1: had to take a lot of shortcuts. Some of them
Speaker 1: even skipped using those coprocessors entirely. They said, these sp
Speaker 1: s are too hard to code for. Instead, and you know,
Speaker 1: we're working on a timeframe here. We could learn how
Speaker 1: to code for those sps, but it would set us
Speaker 1: behind schedule. So instead they focused on just that central
Speaker 1: power pc, you know, the one who's supposed to act
Speaker 1: as an administrator and hand out jobs. Instead of that,
Speaker 1: they're saying no, no, no, no, you do the work.
Speaker 1: Don't don't hand it to your direct reports. We just
Speaker 1: want you to do it. So the power pc had
Speaker 1: to act as the CPU for the whole console, and
Speaker 1: so some titles that were available for both platforms, particularly
Speaker 1: early on in the PC PS three's life cycle, just
Speaker 1: they ran better on the three sixty. If you did
Speaker 1: a side by side comparison, the three sixty just ran better.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't that the PS three was not as
Speaker 1: good a system. It was a great system. It's that
Speaker 1: people had not figured out how to program for it
Speaker 1: effectively yet, so the development process in general was slow,
Speaker 1: and in gaming circles this led to a somewhat incorrect
Speaker 1: observation that there were no games for the p S three.
Speaker 1: This is a meme. You can look it up now.
Speaker 1: The three sixty had been around for months and had
Speaker 1: built up a pretty substantial library of games bout the
Speaker 1: time the PS three launched, so no matter what, Sony
Speaker 1: was going to be playing catch up. But the general
Speaker 1: since was that there just weren't enough really compelling titles
Speaker 1: on the PS three early on, and thus PS three
Speaker 1: doesn't have any games. Was born as a meme, and
Speaker 1: you can see lots of different variations of that same
Speaker 1: statement that wouldn't be true in the long run. I
Speaker 1: don't even think it was a fair assessment. Towards the beginning,
Speaker 1: the PS three had games, and it introduced some games
Speaker 1: that in times that have passed have become real classics.
Speaker 1: So the original Uncharted came out, that was a game
Speaker 1: by Naughty Dog. That one came out for the PS three,
Speaker 1: So did Uncharted two and Uncharted three. They all came
Speaker 1: out for the PS three. And this is a great
Speaker 1: example to show how developers got a better handle on
Speaker 1: the PS three in general, because if you were to
Speaker 1: look at a side by side comparison of the original
Speaker 1: Uncharted on the PS three and then Uncharted three, you
Speaker 1: would see an incredible jump in graphics quality. The two
Speaker 1: games would look like they belong to different systems. So
Speaker 1: with PCs we expect this because developers are always pushing
Speaker 1: the limits of what hardware can do with every release
Speaker 1: of every title. But the PS three is a video
Speaker 1: game console. You don't grade the GPU chip and a
Speaker 1: video game console, you know when you buy it off
Speaker 1: the shelf, that console is that console for the life
Speaker 1: of that console. It doesn't. You don't. You don't take
Speaker 1: it apart and upgrade components. If you're going to do that,
Speaker 1: you should be a PC gamer. The hardware and a
Speaker 1: PS three towards the end of the console's life cycle
Speaker 1: was identical to all intents and purposes as the hardware
Speaker 1: and the original PS three's that launched in two thousand six.
Speaker 1: The game developer, in this case, Naughty Dog, just learned
Speaker 1: how to develop games for that hardware. More effectively, they
Speaker 1: learned the system, so using the exact same hardware that
Speaker 1: they developed Uncharted one four, they produced Uncharted three, and
Speaker 1: the differences are astounding. Naughty Dog, in fact, has even
Speaker 1: said that maybe Uncharted the first game took advantage of
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the PS three's processing power, So that
Speaker 1: all comes back to that complexity of learning how to
Speaker 1: program for the PS three. It was a real barrier.
Speaker 1: The PS three supported some backwards compatibility, which honestly was
Speaker 1: a bit of an achievement considering how dramatically different the
Speaker 1: consoles cpu architecture was from earlier models. The PS three
Speaker 1: could play nearly all of the PlayStation one games. PS
Speaker 1: two games were another story, and that one is a
Speaker 1: little more complicated. So the original PS three consoles often
Speaker 1: called the fat consoles because they were much larger than
Speaker 1: future models. You had the the slim and the super
Speaker 1: slim PS three, but those original ones contained hardware that
Speaker 1: made them compatible with at least some, but not all
Speaker 1: PS two games, So you can get one of those
Speaker 1: original PlayStation three's and you can still play some PS
Speaker 1: two titles. However, future versions of the PS three would
Speaker 1: remove that compatible hardware and you just couldn't play a
Speaker 1: PS two game in a PS three, especially a hard disc.
Speaker 1: You could play PS two games that were emulated to
Speaker 1: run on a PS three, but the the experience wasn't
Speaker 1: always ideal, and there were a lot of different very
Speaker 1: of the PlayStation three console, mostly in hard drive size,
Speaker 1: so you had twenty, forty sixty eight and one sixty
Speaker 1: gigabyte hard drive versions of the PlayStation three that were
Speaker 1: available at one point or another during its life cycle.
Speaker 1: Most models also supported WiFi, so you didn't have to
Speaker 1: have a physical cable to connect to a network. One
Speaker 1: exception was the twenty gigabyte model. That one only had
Speaker 1: the hardwired ethernetport, not a WiFi connective ability. Now, this
Speaker 1: means for the early years of the p S three's
Speaker 1: life cycle, the console underperformed. This wasn't helped by the
Speaker 1: fact that the launch price for the PS three was
Speaker 1: six hundred dollars here in the United States and made
Speaker 1: it the most expensive of the seventh generation consoles, and
Speaker 1: it would have been a challenge to overperform. Obviously, because
Speaker 1: the company's expectations had to have been incredibly high given
Speaker 1: the amazing success of the PS two. They were probably
Speaker 1: thinking this was just gonna be a hockey stick, that
Speaker 1: it was just gonna keep going up and up and up.
Speaker 1: Kim Kutaragi, who at this point was the head of
Speaker 1: Sony Computer Entertainment, must have had some complicated feelings about this.
Speaker 1: He had created an entire division within Sony, an entire
Speaker 1: business that Sony had not been in, and had seen
Speaker 1: impress of success over the course of just a decade.
Speaker 1: But in November two thousand six he would change positions,
Speaker 1: going from being the president and group CEO of Sony
Speaker 1: Computer Entertainment to its chairman and group CEO. Now that
Speaker 1: sounds like a promotion, right president to CEO, But according
Speaker 1: to most sources I was reading, it was really showing
Speaker 1: that the company was moving him out of a role
Speaker 1: where he would have day to day operations control of
Speaker 1: the division. It was more of a general oversight, but
Speaker 1: he would no longer be the person calling the shots
Speaker 1: day to day. Sony was dealing with a serious shortfall
Speaker 1: with this PS three. The sales were falling behind Microsoft
Speaker 1: in those early days, and Nintendo's WE was winning out
Speaker 1: as well. And I should add that when it was
Speaker 1: all said and done, when everything is done with the
Speaker 1: seventh generation of consoles, WE would be the king. They
Speaker 1: sold far more consoles of the week Nintendo did than
Speaker 1: Sony or Microsoft did with their consoles. But then Sony
Speaker 1: would make up lost ground. It would actually take second place.
Speaker 1: So while the Xbox three sixty led the way for
Speaker 1: most of the early years of the P S three,
Speaker 1: Sony would ultimately make up that lost ground before the
Speaker 1: end of its life cycle. Of course, this is also
Speaker 1: helped by the fact that Sony supports its consoles much
Speaker 1: longer than the other companies do. Howard Stringer, the CEO
Speaker 1: for Sony around this time, said that Kutaragi was a
Speaker 1: star executive with um let's say communications issues. Stringer said
Speaker 1: that kudarag he wasn't very good when it came to
Speaker 1: communicating with other folks in the company, including people higher
Speaker 1: up on the hierarchy like his boss. He was seen
Speaker 1: as brilliant, but stubborn, difficult to work with, and maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit arrogant. Kazhai, who had been with Sony
Speaker 1: Computer Entertainment since nine and who had been a large
Speaker 1: part of the success story of the PS two, would
Speaker 1: shift from being the head of Sony Computer in North
Speaker 1: America to stepping in as president for the entire Sony
Speaker 1: Computer Division, the global head of that part of Sony,
Speaker 1: and he would also later on go on to become
Speaker 1: the head of Sony Corporation overall. That again, was probably
Speaker 1: something Kutaragi had hoped for at one point. He didn't
Speaker 1: make it. His protege did. In two thousand seven, Kutaragi
Speaker 1: surprised a few people by announcing he was stepping down
Speaker 1: and retiring. He would be named an honorary chairman of
Speaker 1: Sony Computer Entertainment, but his formal leadership role had come
Speaker 1: to an end, and so the father of the PlayStation
Speaker 1: would leave Sony. But the story of the PlayStation was
Speaker 1: far from over, So in our next episode, I'll wrap
Speaker 1: up the rest of the PlayStation three story talking a
Speaker 1: little bit about the duel Shock three controller, which would
Speaker 1: come out a year after Kutaragi left the company. And
Speaker 1: also how the PlayStation for change direction again, how all
Speaker 1: the course that was laid with a PS three switched
Speaker 1: again with the PS four, and how that leads up
Speaker 1: to the PS five. I anticipate that next episode will
Speaker 1: be the last one in this in this series for now,
Speaker 1: with a little bit at the end to talk about
Speaker 1: the announcements of the PS five. We'll see. As you
Speaker 1: guys have noticed, I am luquacious in nature, and sometimes
Speaker 1: these episodes end up having more to them than I anticipated.
Speaker 1: But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, whether it's a quick one off, maybe
Speaker 1: there's a company you want to hear about, a specific
Speaker 1: product you want to hear about. Maybe there's a trend
Speaker 1: in technology you want to know more about, let me know.
Speaker 1: Send me a message on Facebook or Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for both is text stuff H s W and now
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio, you app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H