In these days of faceless and nameless corporate product development, Ken Kutaragi stands out. As an engineer at Sony, he not only created the PlayStation, the first optical disc-based video game platform, but pushed an unwilling company to market it. By 2003, the game system was contributing 60 percent of the company's operating profit and Kutaragi became a legend.
Kutaragi was born in August 1950 in Tokyo. A straight-A student, he worked after school in his family's printing business. But the budding engineer loved to tinker and built gadgets such as go-carts and amplifiers. In 1975, Kutaragi turned his childhood hobby into a degree in electrical engineering from Denki Tsushin University in Tokyo, and then joined Sony as a researcher in the company's digital research labs.
One of Kutaragi's first experiences with Sony's reticence about his ideas was his work on developing an LCD projector that the company did not approve. He also worked on Sony's early Mavica digital camera and gained a reputation as a problem solver and a forward thinker.
One day in the mid 1980s, Kutaragi watched his sons play with their Nintendo and believed there was an opportunity. Because gaming was considered beneath Sony, he worked in secret with Nintendo to develop a new sound chip for the gaming company's new 16-bit Super NES platform. In 1988, after receiving support from Sony CEO Norio Ohga to finish development on the chip, the SPC700, Kutaragi fought for, and received, funding to develop his CD-ROM version of the Super NES, which used cartridges, for Nintendo.
Corporate sparring and technology legal challenges forced Sony and Nintendo apart in 1991, and Kutaragi again convinced upper management to create a completely new Sony-branded CD-based game system. While many in Sony considered video game machines to be toys, Kutaragi insisted that he was actually building a computer.
The PlayStation, or PSX, became available in December 1994 in Japan and in September 1995 in the U.S. PlayStation quickly became the best-selling video game system on the planet with more than 100 million units of this original system were sold until production ended in March 2006.
PlayStation 2 appeared in 2000 and sold more than 125 million units and garnered a 70 percent market share. The PlayStation Portable, or PSP, arrived in November 2004, followed by the PlayStation 3 in November 2006. In 2000, Business Week magazine dubbed him "Sony's indispensable samurai." Largely because of Kutaragi and the PlayStation, video games earn more money than theatrical films.
According to one profile, Kutaragi's management style was considered outspoken, and he was described by one co-worker as unusually animated and passionate. Legend has it he once offered to settle a PlayStation design argument by arm-wrestling.
In addition to his being president of Sony's Computer Entertainment division (SCEI) from 1999 to 2003, he was named executive deputy president in charge of the Game Business Group and the Broadband Network Company. In 2006 he became chairman of SCEI and retired in June 2007 as honorary chairman.
In 2004, Time magazine listed Kutaragi on its “100 Most Influential People”, dubbing him the "Gutenberg of Video Games."