PlayStation has become one of the largest gaming companies in history, now being one of the 3 major console creators in the world alongside Microsoft and Nintendo. However, Ken Kutatagi, known as “the Father of PlayStation”, has stated there was at one point immense doubt placed on the original system and how it would perform in the market.
In a keynote spot at Tokyo Game Show, Mr. Kutaragi, who is known for watching over the development of the PS1, PS2, and PS3, stated that he and the other founding member optioned the hardware around the world in 1993 and were met with a lot of negative feedback. He would go on to say:
We wanted to share our passion…And we wanted to hear what their expectations were and what they did not expect, so we wanted to hear from them. So we visited dozens of companies, if not hundreds, we visited a lot of game makers, it was a great memory … they were not interested at all. They just said, ‘Don’t do it. There were multiple companies and none of them were successful. You are going to fail.’ That’s what they told us.
Mr. Kutagari would say that even after signing with Sony, he and the founders had many doubters who believed the system would be a flop. Fortunately, the system did not face plant like some thought it would.
The original PlayStation system would go on to sell 100,000 units in the first day of sales in Japan 1994 and would reach a total of around two million units sold by the end of that year. By the end of its run, the PlayStation sold 102.4 million units of hardware with 960 million units of software being sold alongside it making it the 6th highest selling console of all time to date and having two of their 4 successors above them on that list.