THE SECOND COMING

In 1999, Sony launched what would become the best-selling game console of all time. These are the stories of the people on the ground

- Steven L Kent

Considering the success of the original PlayStation, hardware architect Ken Kutaragi could safely say he’d pitched a shutout. With PlayStation 2, he planned to pitch a no-hitter. If everything went as planned, Nintendo and Sega wouldn’t even get a single runner on base.

On March 1, 1999, Sony unveiled the PlayStation 2 in a worldwide press conference held in the Tokyo International Forum – a lavish, glass-encased convention centre complete with an enormous opera-house-style meeting hall. Reporters, industry executives and other invitees flew in from all around the globe to attend the event, which was titled ‘A Glimpse Of The Future’.

The event began with Sony Computer Entertainment president Teruhisa Tokunaka giving a speech in which he announced the company had shipped its 50 millionth PlayStation. Kutaragi, both the man of the hour and the host of the event, then ran several demonstrations of the Emotion Engine technology that would power the next PlayStation.

The demonstration included video of dozens of balls, faces and 3D models. By modern standards, the graphics in those demonstrations look primitive, but by 1999 standards, they were groundbreaking. The demonstrations included an image of an old man’s face that was considered lifelike at the time. Kutaragi demonstrated his new console’s ability to animate dozens of objects and track their motions. Everything looked polished, camouflaging three days of turmoil that had taken place behind the scenes.