Latest news with #KenKutaragi
Time of India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Could a single uncomfortable call have changed gaming forever? How Nintendo's silent betrayal turned Sony into a rival
In the early 1980s, America's video game industry had collapsed, thanks in no small part to the catastrophic failure of the E.T. video game, a rushed tie-in that became an infamous symbol of overhyped flops. Amidst this turmoil, Japan's Nintendo saw opportunity. With the 1983 release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), they didn't just find success—they became synonymous with gaming itself. If you said 'video game,' you meant Nintendo. By the end of the decade, the NES had conquered living rooms around the globe. With the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) planned for launch in the early '90s, Nintendo was riding high. But as technology raced ahead, a new format loomed large on the horizon: the CD-ROM. Cartridges, Nintendo's weapon of choice, were fast becoming relics. Rather than risk irrelevance, Nintendo made a fateful decision. Enter Sony: A Perfect Match That Never Was In 1988, Nintendo partnered with Sony—then an electronics powerhouse best known for its Walkman and stereo systems—to develop a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The project was dubbed the 'Nintendo Play Station.' It was to be the future of gaming: cartridges for now, CD-ROMs for tomorrow. Ken Kutaragi, a Sony engineer with a keen eye for gaming, spearheaded the design. But behind the scenes, tensions brewed. Nintendo, famously protective of its ecosystem, was uneasy about giving Sony too much control over software. And so, as the world waited for the next great innovation, Nintendo made a move that stunned even its partner. You Might Also Like: College lecturer's gaming obsession with 'Call of Duty' and 'Fortnite' lands him in hospital emergency iStock Super Nintendo console with cartridge based system. The Cold Shoulder Heard Round the World Instead of renegotiating terms or even giving Sony a courtesy call, Nintendo ghosted them—completely. In a dramatic twist, the company announced, during the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), that it would be partnering with Sony's rival, Philips, on the CD-ROM project. Sony executives, along with the rest of the world, learned the news live from the press release. It was a corporate betrayal of Shakespearean proportions. Sony had poured years of R&D and millions of yen into a joint project, only to be cast aside. But rather than walk away in defeat, Sony made a bold pivot—one that would reshape entertainment forever. — Genki_JPN (@Genki_JPN) From Scorned Partner to Market Leader What followed was perhaps the greatest revenge arc in tech history. Ken Kutaragi convinced Sony brass not to shelve their console dreams but to turn the prototype into a fully standalone system. And so, the PlayStation was born—not as a collaboration, but as a challenge. You Might Also Like: Google wanted to hire this Indian founder who hacked games and built his AI startup. Why he rejected them multiple times? Released in Japan on December 3, 1994, the original Sony PlayStation had a rocky start. It lacked a robust game library and suffered from limited visibility in traditional gaming retail spaces. Yet, with a built-in CD-ROM drive, a more powerful processor, and room for more immersive worlds, it had something Nintendo didn't: potential. — VideoGameHstry (@VideoGameHstry) Sony's aggressive pricing, focus on cutting-edge graphics, and savvy marketing soon paid off. Within months, millions of PlayStations were sold. By 1997, Sony had surpassed both Sega and Nintendo in market share. iStock Original Sony Play Station launched in 1994. The Irony of Obsolescence Meanwhile, Nintendo doubled down on cartridges with the Nintendo 64, released in 1996—a year after the PlayStation. While nostalgic millennials fondly remember Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , the N64 was commercially underwhelming, selling only 40 million units. The PlayStation? Over 102 million units. And when the PlayStation 2 launched in 2000—with a DVD player included—it became not just a gaming device, but a living room staple. To date, it remains the best-selling console of all time, with nearly 159 million units sold. It was more than a console; it was a coronation. A Legacy of Silence Looking back, it's hard to overstate the impact of that silent snub. Had Nintendo handled the disagreement with Sony more diplomatically, the PlayStation may never have been born. And yet, that very act of corporate caution—of dodging a difficult conversation—unleashed a competitor that has outpaced Nintendo in nearly every hardware generation since. In an industry defined by innovation, risk-taking, and technological brinkmanship, it wasn't a brilliant design or daring gamble that changed history. It was a missed call. Nintendo didn't just lose a deal. They created their greatest rival. And decades later, the ghost of that phone call still haunts the industry.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Super Nintendo consoles have been quietly overclocking themselves for 35 years, but it took until 2025 for the SNES fandom to notice
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It's been 35 years since the SNES first launched as the Super Famicom in Japan, complete with a sound chip designed by the father of PlayStation himself, Ken Kutaragi. Over the past few weeks, Super Nintendo fans have made a curious discovery – that chip has been quietly overclocking itself over the decades, making SNES consoles run ever so slightly faster than they did back in the day. The idea that "SNES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age" was posited back on February 26 via TASBot – the speedrunning robot operated by community figure Alan "dwangoAC" Cecil – alongside a call for data detailing exactly how quickly everyone's Super Nintendo is running. After well over 100 responses, the hypothesis is starting to seem pretty definitive. A SNES in 2025 is going to run faster than it did when it was originally manufactured. The SNES has a pair of audio chips that work together to produce audio, including the SCP700 coprocessor designed by Kutaragi. As 404 Media reports based on an interview with Cecil, Nintendo's original developer documentation reported that the SCP700 ran with a digital signal processing, or DSP, rate of 32,000hz. By 2007, emulator developers had clocked the real-world DSP rate at 32,040Hz. In 2025, the data suggests the average is now 32,076Hz, with some units clocked as fast as 32,182Hz. If audio data gets processed through the SNES faster, that speeds up one potential bottleneck on how fast the console can run a game. Depending on how the game is programmed, this could have a variety of effects, such as speeding up the loads between rooms in a game like Super Metroid. You might think this would have a big effect for speedrunners, but Cecil doesn't expect it to be profound. "We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil tells 404 Media. 'We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU." He believes even the fastest SNES units would likely only benefit a speedrun by a few frames – likely far less than a second – and the margins in most human speedrunning communities are typically larger than that. And, well... it's not like any speedrunner is suffering the disadvantage of a newly manufactured SNES in 2025. But why are these chips faster now? That's the detail that hasn't been fully nailed down. Computer parts are obviously made up of physical materials, and those materials degrade and change over time. The SCP700's DSP rate is governed by a ceramic resonator, and ceramic is sensitive enough for these types of chips to fluctuate in performance based on temperature, similar to silicon producing minor differences in modern CPUs. For now, it's probably safest to attribute all this to the simple entropy of the universe. Folks like Cecil will certainly be continuing in the research even as, day by day, our SNESes all get that tiny fraction faster. Think of it this way: the best SNES games are now all that tiny bit better.
