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"so he built an empire" -- emperor Kaz Hirai
Against highly unfavorable odds, he led a small cadre into lands ruled by Nintendo and Sega to wage war for console supremacy and a vanquished them both in humiliation at the height of their power. An epic feat that shocked the gaming world, forever changed gaming's landscape and with it, Sony Group Corp.'s fortunes. So influential was his empire, that it drew in 60% of the Sony's revenue at one point; but Kutaragi's tale isn't just one about what he did in the past to build an empire. His is also a tale of legacy provisions he made before passing the scepter to Hirai that continue to sustain the empire's vigor across various interests:
Hardware -- After witnessing System G's brillance, Kutaragi called for a real-time 3D CG philosophy that his PS1 would be first to establish in the industry as "graphics synthesis". His PS2 solidified the philosophy and introduced "emotion synthesis" (i.e., graphics and non-graphics expressions calculated in real-time) to games. With PS3, he extended the philosophy to "reality synthesis" (i.e., graphics synthesis and emotion synthesis calculated in real-time, presented in stereoscopic 3D with the natural sounds of "audio synthesis"), which opened the prospect for VR on PS4. All three consoles are exhibits of what made SIE's hardware special, but PS3 is most special among them as it has been the source of inspiration behind every PS console since. It was a risky a act for Kutaragi to trade ease of development for a chip faster than Moore's Law, but that trade handed successive generations of PS consoles an ingenious weapon with which to combat more powerful systems. PS3 normalized asynchronous compute engine architecture. It's the most significant aspect of CELL that ranger Mark Cerny knows well, now marketed as 'ACE' for AMD GPUs. These GPUs closely mimic CELL's task submission/job execution (i.e., SPURS), but PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5's GPUs are CELL's closest mimics. They "replicate" the SPU Runtime System (SPURS) while being SPU Task Manager (STM)-style efficient. STM (entries [0012], [0015] and [0016] explain what and why; [0070], [0071] and [0072] touch on non-CELL implementations and STM results) allows an SPU to load portions of task queues into its local store (i.e., memory) used as "cache", select the tasks that match its current program code and return the ones that don't to main memory as a way to minimize costly context switching/"cache" flushing. PS4/PS4 Pro's GPUs imitate this process by means of a "volatile bit" that selectively invalidates cache lines to reduce cache flushing when L2 is used for compute and graphics at the same time. PS5 keeps with PS4/PS4 Pro's volatile bit process and has a similar process for its I/O complex. Coherency engines in the complex tell cache scrubbers on the GPU which address ranges to scrub away so as to avoid full cache flushes when the SSD is read. Without these STM-inspired efficiency measures, PS4 Pro and PS5 would've been easy marks for One X and Series X with no way to effectively counter their brute-force asynchronous GPU compute or outduel SX's Velocity architecture. That despite D3D12's Multi-engine Resource/Enhanced Barrier hobbling both Xbox GPUs by requiring full cache flushes after they complete their work. The popular opinion is that PS3 was a failure, but profitability and market share aren't the only measures of success. The unpopular fact is that from a technological standpoint, PS3 is the saving grace of current/future PS consoles. They are Kutaragi's standard-bearers. His due honor for attempting to make CELL a fixture in the world of computing, which unintentionally yet consequently gave Cerny/SIE the privilege of putting certain CELL related features on AMD's GPU roadmap for the benefit of AMD, SIE and industry. 'The Road to' begins with CELL.
Software -- Kutaragi's crucible (i.e., a precursor CPU that's GPU-like) tested the mettle of PS Studios' ranks and steeled them for battle in the age of GPU asynchronous compute programming years before the dawn. For two generations, Redmond's assaults have been repelled by happy warriors (e.g., the ICE Team) highly skilled in the art of PS3. Mastery of Packing fp16 shader operations on SPUs and checkerboard MLAA on SPUs were trials for fp16 'Rapid Packed Math' usage and checkerboard rendering on PS4 Pro. PS3 pushed PS Studios' elite to be the most cunning at their craft. The evidence of history bears witness to the claim. Kutaragi is the only CEO (or system architect for that matter) to ever assure SIE's hardware and programmer competence ahead of future trends. The grateful warriors salute him.
Network -- As SCEI's emperor with broad authority inside Sony Group Corp.'s empire, Kutaragi the Great prepared SCE/SIE for future expansion when he commissioned the PSNP's construction. Emperor Jim Ryan recollected, it was his long-held vision: "I think he foresaw the network era and was talking about the network era many, many years before it became reality"... "he talked about this before we could really comprehend what he was saying". His visionary leadership and persistence (he tried with PS BB in Japan, but it failed to gain traction; then he tried with PSN) are the reasons for PSN appearing on SIE's timeline when it did. Kutaragi's timing of PSN changed the arc of SIE's history in ways that can't be fully appraised. A partial appraisal is that PSN has been vital to most growth vectors. All of which his successors have reaped/will reap the rewards of. The platform has generated billions in profit since operation, and is the enabler of a broader P2P networking, cloud, PC and mobile vision that will generate billions more in perpetuity. In the area of P2P networking, the day is coming when PSN manages an interoperable distributed ledger (i.e., an interoperable blockchain). An inevitability that Kutaragi didn't foresee, yet somehow he still conceived CELL to be "a bus for peer-to-peer computing" (translated by DeepL); which a scribe worded as 'a peer-to-peer web that would transform every home into a kind of domestic (and legal) Napster'. No longer emperor in the seat of power, he still speaks of the P2P model; but in the context of it being at the core of blockchain technology.
Multimedia-as-a-Service/Transmedia -- 'games and other services for PlayStation. His goal is to establish the PlayStation as a separate brand, not part of a dedicated Sony network for the online distribution of music, movies, and TV shows', is how a scribe noted Kutaragi's endeavor to define 'PlayStation' as a brand that offers popular game and non-game content. His vision was to wield entertainment as an instrument with which to spread the brand's influence under the declaration that PlayStation is for entertainment, not just games. PS Music with Spotify, PS Video (now Sony Pictures Core on Plus) and his global aspiration for what emerged as PS Vue are/were testaments to the declaration. SIE's proposal to transition PS Plus into "Services 3.0" and scale it out in partnership with leading subscription service providers is the latest testament. It's also part of a larger aim to transform SIE into a transmedia powerhouse through collaboration with other Sony Group divisions. The empire's renewed focus on collaborative transformation is a recommitment to the timeless '21st Century Entertainment' strategy that he devised; later adjoined by Ryan to include theme park attractions and toys.
GaaS/Live Service -- Is dead without PSN's support and GaaS was always an objective of Kutaragi's network services ambition, per the scribe.
GaaS/Game Streaming -- Kutaragi saw 'the Cloud' gathering from afar and readied PS3 for a ubiquitous game streaming future before it made sense to the masses. Prior to PS2's US launch, he riddled that PS3 would "totally disappear as a console, as a shape". At 9:51 - 9:52 Tokyo time (2:51 - 2:52 BST if Tokyo time isn't shown) of his final keynote as emperor, he predicted that networks would become fast enough to reliably stream video for services by 2016. He then justified PS3's gaming hardware as being necessary to take advantage of a speedier future network. PS Now launched in major territories from 2014 - 2016 as a nebulous PS3 requiring a 5mbps connection speed for 720p streaming. As it turns out, one SPU can encode a 720p stream at 5mbps. Every initial PS Now subscriber and every PS3 game that's ever been or will be streamed via Plus Premium is a credit to him. The PS streaming platform is as much a credit to him as it is to David Perry, Steve Perlman and the noble scout, Eric Lempel. SIE was first to act on Gaikai (stream to any webpage/browser) and OnLive (perceptual science, furthered by iSIZE's acquisition and acquired perceptual precoder) because Kutaragi was first to know: "In the future, broadband will connect all appliances - console, TV, phone, PC, everything. Then exclusivity means nothing".
PC -- A platform that Kutaragi was indifferent towards, but his notion that exclusives would find their way onto PC in the then-future via streaming means he knew that PC would have a role in the empire's scheme to seize greater mind share. The eventuality of letting Plus Premium members stream first-party titles they purchase for PC (e.g., Helldivers 2 via Steam Cloud Play developer opt-in) to a TV, phone, tablet or PS Portal follows his logic; and can't be enabled without his legacy provision, PSN.
Mobile -- With the threat of mobile's march into gaming looming large on the horizon, Kutaragi began work to fashion a shield that PS consoles could use in the inevitable fight. Scrolls from the period reveal that before he relinquished the throne, a PSP DualShock dock and remote play controller (his idea) that served up music, movies, TV shows, mini games (some of these possibly PS Mobile for Android games) and e-mails were contemplated. The remote play controller arose out of a long held suspicion that mobile phones would eventually be an enemy of PS consoles. His remote play controller was lost to time, until it was publicized as a new USPTO filing in 2019. PS Portal is a pared-down version. For now it's touted as just a remote player, but despite having ~6GB storage (guessing here, I think it's that small because SIE plans to update Portal with a ML downloader that "cloud delivers"/auto deletes individual mobile game levels and areas as necessary so that Portal can store segments of multiple titles for local play; hence Portal's rumored codename: 'Q' 'Lite'), it's only a few approved media and VoWifi apps away from also being the convergence/communications device he anticipated in the '90 (as emperor Andrew House recalled: "I remember him talking about there was going to be a convergence between all forms of media and entertainment into a single communications device"). The head craftsman Hideaki Nishino and his smiths may have hammered out Portal's overall design DualSense perspective, but it was Kutaragi who detailed Portal's invention from a home console/cloud/mobile gaming perspective. An important distinction since it seems that SIE will use Portal as both a device to increase PS5's usage rate and as a wedge to steer mobile game purchases (would only be fully downloadable to non-Portal Android and iOS devices) PS Store's way; and have those purchases linked to PS Plus for Portal "Cloud Delivery" and cross-progression.
AI -- Long before AI became a hot topic of discussion, Kutaragi's take was that "one Cell or cluster of Cells can also function as a server; but whereas the present Internet mainly handles characters, applications on the Cell network will also handle semantics and reasoning". This was a hint at his intention to spark an AI revolution within SIE. Several years later the neighboring state of IBM would present its approach to training neural networks on CELL processors and a workaround for SPEs to compute training functions when bandwidth is limited. Kutaragi always thought ahead and occasionally pushed to do more than necessary for the glory of the empire. The latter is seen in architecture he chose for CELL, which foreshadowed AI accelerators. Its array of SPEs are SIMD dataflow units with support for 8-bit operations and SRAM connected to a high-bandwidth on-chip network that allows SPEs to access each others SRAMs directly. These are attributes of today's dedicated AI accelerators from IBM, Graphcore and others (last paragraph). "Enormous applications that require image processing and large-volume computing" were other CELL use cases he considered. A real-world example is Toshiba's SpursEngine variant that was used for Super Resolution video up-conversion in the image processing domain. Now two gens removed from PS3, the internet is abuzz with talk about PS5 Pro's claimed use of ML (specifically, the 300 TOPS of 8-bit computation for PSML). At minimum, the PS5 Pro's AI acceleration hardware will be Tempest Engine-like which means it too will trace back to the chip Kutaragi envisioned full of new age thinking. CELL continues to prove itself a valuable resource and wise expenditure of the empire's treasure.
Metaverse -- Ryan saw PS Home as "a very early manifestation of a platform metaverse". Ever the visionary, Kutaragi saw it as "only the beginning of what will come". In his mind's eye, what was to come (and still is) was a realm of make.believe-as-a-service illusions and spectacles to enchant the people. This realm wasn't a metaverse experience, it was a blended 'Cyber Society' experience. A mixed realm that "combines the real and the imaginary" with music, movies, games and other entertainment. The power to muster the realm's alchemy in cyberspace was to come from a CELL network. Likely, a network of petaFLOP class CELL supercomputers running ML, MR and other applications in conjunction with CELL based consoles distributed across the land. His was a grand vision that now aligns with emperor Kenichiro Yoshida's perception of the so-called "metaverse", and Sony's approach to it (Q2., Q3. and Q4). Kutaragi wasn't "kRaZy", he was clairvoyant and well-versed. One of his earliest insights into a MR cyberverse was recorded by a scribe who wrote that while he was waving his arm, he said:"This, this is the real broadband interface" (last sentence of the article Onslaught posted). Reality interfaces and the alchemy of reality synthesis have come in phases throughout the empire's existence. Phase 1 was Play, Groove, Chat and Kinetic for EyeToy, PS Eye with EyePet in S3D, PS Move and the PS3 Reality Synthesis (i.e. end-to-end 3D viewed in Stereoscopic 3D, driven by SPUs and the RSX GPU) VR experiments that gave rise to PS VR. Social VR experimentation, PS Camera and its associated Asobi/AR Bots, PS HD Camera and PS VR2/Sense controllers were Phase 2. Phase 3 is in follow ups to these experiences and peripherals. In particular, the next PS HMD (to be named PS XR…?) which the upcoming Sony XR HMD already solves for. In that day, Kutaragi's 'Cyber Society' will no longer be a concept of his imagination; rather a reality that his consoles (PS2/PS3) encouraged Magic Lab's magicians and Sony Corp.'s wizards to formulate.
Frankly, Kutaragi was wise beyond his years on the throne. The passage of time, brand/IP maturation and tech advancement across industries affirm his sweeping vision; and have allowed his successors to see what he saw decades earlier as they look to further build on the foundation he laid, while moving to extend the empire's reach into areas of interest he identified beyond the traditional pillars he set in place during his rule.
His greatest success is that he made the success of every SCE/SIE emperor before (Toshio Ozawa, Shigeo Maruyama, Teruhisa Tokunaka et al were largely titular heads, Kutaragi was at helm) and after him possible. Those who came before are beneficiaries of his gamble to build an empire. Those who came/come after are inheritors of provisions he made to ensure the empire's survival and competitiveness.
Here's to Ken Kutaragi, the man, the myth, the legend, "the Oracle", The G.O.A.T. May he continue to live long.
Long live the empire.
Against highly unfavorable odds, he led a small cadre into lands ruled by Nintendo and Sega to wage war for console supremacy and a vanquished them both in humiliation at the height of their power. An epic feat that shocked the gaming world, forever changed gaming's landscape and with it, Sony Group Corp.'s fortunes. So influential was his empire, that it drew in 60% of the Sony's revenue at one point; but Kutaragi's tale isn't just one about what he did in the past to build an empire. His is also a tale of legacy provisions he made before passing the scepter to Hirai that continue to sustain the empire's vigor across various interests:
Hardware -- After witnessing System G's brillance, Kutaragi called for a real-time 3D CG philosophy that his PS1 would be first to establish in the industry as "graphics synthesis". His PS2 solidified the philosophy and introduced "emotion synthesis" (i.e., graphics and non-graphics expressions calculated in real-time) to games. With PS3, he extended the philosophy to "reality synthesis" (i.e., graphics synthesis and emotion synthesis calculated in real-time, presented in stereoscopic 3D with the natural sounds of "audio synthesis"), which opened the prospect for VR on PS4. All three consoles are exhibits of what made SIE's hardware special, but PS3 is most special among them as it has been the source of inspiration behind every PS console since. It was a risky a act for Kutaragi to trade ease of development for a chip faster than Moore's Law, but that trade handed successive generations of PS consoles an ingenious weapon with which to combat more powerful systems. PS3 normalized asynchronous compute engine architecture. It's the most significant aspect of CELL that ranger Mark Cerny knows well, now marketed as 'ACE' for AMD GPUs. These GPUs closely mimic CELL's task submission/job execution (i.e., SPURS), but PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5's GPUs are CELL's closest mimics. They "replicate" the SPU Runtime System (SPURS) while being SPU Task Manager (STM)-style efficient. STM (entries [0012], [0015] and [0016] explain what and why; [0070], [0071] and [0072] touch on non-CELL implementations and STM results) allows an SPU to load portions of task queues into its local store (i.e., memory) used as "cache", select the tasks that match its current program code and return the ones that don't to main memory as a way to minimize costly context switching/"cache" flushing. PS4/PS4 Pro's GPUs imitate this process by means of a "volatile bit" that selectively invalidates cache lines to reduce cache flushing when L2 is used for compute and graphics at the same time. PS5 keeps with PS4/PS4 Pro's volatile bit process and has a similar process for its I/O complex. Coherency engines in the complex tell cache scrubbers on the GPU which address ranges to scrub away so as to avoid full cache flushes when the SSD is read. Without these STM-inspired efficiency measures, PS4 Pro and PS5 would've been easy marks for One X and Series X with no way to effectively counter their brute-force asynchronous GPU compute or outduel SX's Velocity architecture. That despite D3D12's Multi-engine Resource/Enhanced Barrier hobbling both Xbox GPUs by requiring full cache flushes after they complete their work. The popular opinion is that PS3 was a failure, but profitability and market share aren't the only measures of success. The unpopular fact is that from a technological standpoint, PS3 is the saving grace of current/future PS consoles. They are Kutaragi's standard-bearers. His due honor for attempting to make CELL a fixture in the world of computing, which unintentionally yet consequently gave Cerny/SIE the privilege of putting certain CELL related features on AMD's GPU roadmap for the benefit of AMD, SIE and industry. 'The Road to' begins with CELL.
Software -- Kutaragi's crucible (i.e., a precursor CPU that's GPU-like) tested the mettle of PS Studios' ranks and steeled them for battle in the age of GPU asynchronous compute programming years before the dawn. For two generations, Redmond's assaults have been repelled by happy warriors (e.g., the ICE Team) highly skilled in the art of PS3. Mastery of Packing fp16 shader operations on SPUs and checkerboard MLAA on SPUs were trials for fp16 'Rapid Packed Math' usage and checkerboard rendering on PS4 Pro. PS3 pushed PS Studios' elite to be the most cunning at their craft. The evidence of history bears witness to the claim. Kutaragi is the only CEO (or system architect for that matter) to ever assure SIE's hardware and programmer competence ahead of future trends. The grateful warriors salute him.
Network -- As SCEI's emperor with broad authority inside Sony Group Corp.'s empire, Kutaragi the Great prepared SCE/SIE for future expansion when he commissioned the PSNP's construction. Emperor Jim Ryan recollected, it was his long-held vision: "I think he foresaw the network era and was talking about the network era many, many years before it became reality"... "he talked about this before we could really comprehend what he was saying". His visionary leadership and persistence (he tried with PS BB in Japan, but it failed to gain traction; then he tried with PSN) are the reasons for PSN appearing on SIE's timeline when it did. Kutaragi's timing of PSN changed the arc of SIE's history in ways that can't be fully appraised. A partial appraisal is that PSN has been vital to most growth vectors. All of which his successors have reaped/will reap the rewards of. The platform has generated billions in profit since operation, and is the enabler of a broader P2P networking, cloud, PC and mobile vision that will generate billions more in perpetuity. In the area of P2P networking, the day is coming when PSN manages an interoperable distributed ledger (i.e., an interoperable blockchain). An inevitability that Kutaragi didn't foresee, yet somehow he still conceived CELL to be "a bus for peer-to-peer computing" (translated by DeepL); which a scribe worded as 'a peer-to-peer web that would transform every home into a kind of domestic (and legal) Napster'. No longer emperor in the seat of power, he still speaks of the P2P model; but in the context of it being at the core of blockchain technology.
Multimedia-as-a-Service/Transmedia -- 'games and other services for PlayStation. His goal is to establish the PlayStation as a separate brand, not part of a dedicated Sony network for the online distribution of music, movies, and TV shows', is how a scribe noted Kutaragi's endeavor to define 'PlayStation' as a brand that offers popular game and non-game content. His vision was to wield entertainment as an instrument with which to spread the brand's influence under the declaration that PlayStation is for entertainment, not just games. PS Music with Spotify, PS Video (now Sony Pictures Core on Plus) and his global aspiration for what emerged as PS Vue are/were testaments to the declaration. SIE's proposal to transition PS Plus into "Services 3.0" and scale it out in partnership with leading subscription service providers is the latest testament. It's also part of a larger aim to transform SIE into a transmedia powerhouse through collaboration with other Sony Group divisions. The empire's renewed focus on collaborative transformation is a recommitment to the timeless '21st Century Entertainment' strategy that he devised; later adjoined by Ryan to include theme park attractions and toys.
GaaS/Live Service -- Is dead without PSN's support and GaaS was always an objective of Kutaragi's network services ambition, per the scribe.
GaaS/Game Streaming -- Kutaragi saw 'the Cloud' gathering from afar and readied PS3 for a ubiquitous game streaming future before it made sense to the masses. Prior to PS2's US launch, he riddled that PS3 would "totally disappear as a console, as a shape". At 9:51 - 9:52 Tokyo time (2:51 - 2:52 BST if Tokyo time isn't shown) of his final keynote as emperor, he predicted that networks would become fast enough to reliably stream video for services by 2016. He then justified PS3's gaming hardware as being necessary to take advantage of a speedier future network. PS Now launched in major territories from 2014 - 2016 as a nebulous PS3 requiring a 5mbps connection speed for 720p streaming. As it turns out, one SPU can encode a 720p stream at 5mbps. Every initial PS Now subscriber and every PS3 game that's ever been or will be streamed via Plus Premium is a credit to him. The PS streaming platform is as much a credit to him as it is to David Perry, Steve Perlman and the noble scout, Eric Lempel. SIE was first to act on Gaikai (stream to any webpage/browser) and OnLive (perceptual science, furthered by iSIZE's acquisition and acquired perceptual precoder) because Kutaragi was first to know: "In the future, broadband will connect all appliances - console, TV, phone, PC, everything. Then exclusivity means nothing".
PC -- A platform that Kutaragi was indifferent towards, but his notion that exclusives would find their way onto PC in the then-future via streaming means he knew that PC would have a role in the empire's scheme to seize greater mind share. The eventuality of letting Plus Premium members stream first-party titles they purchase for PC (e.g., Helldivers 2 via Steam Cloud Play developer opt-in) to a TV, phone, tablet or PS Portal follows his logic; and can't be enabled without his legacy provision, PSN.
Mobile -- With the threat of mobile's march into gaming looming large on the horizon, Kutaragi began work to fashion a shield that PS consoles could use in the inevitable fight. Scrolls from the period reveal that before he relinquished the throne, a PSP DualShock dock and remote play controller (his idea) that served up music, movies, TV shows, mini games (some of these possibly PS Mobile for Android games) and e-mails were contemplated. The remote play controller arose out of a long held suspicion that mobile phones would eventually be an enemy of PS consoles. His remote play controller was lost to time, until it was publicized as a new USPTO filing in 2019. PS Portal is a pared-down version. For now it's touted as just a remote player, but despite having ~6GB storage (guessing here, I think it's that small because SIE plans to update Portal with a ML downloader that "cloud delivers"/auto deletes individual mobile game levels and areas as necessary so that Portal can store segments of multiple titles for local play; hence Portal's rumored codename: 'Q' 'Lite'), it's only a few approved media and VoWifi apps away from also being the convergence/communications device he anticipated in the '90 (as emperor Andrew House recalled: "I remember him talking about there was going to be a convergence between all forms of media and entertainment into a single communications device"). The head craftsman Hideaki Nishino and his smiths may have hammered out Portal's overall design DualSense perspective, but it was Kutaragi who detailed Portal's invention from a home console/cloud/mobile gaming perspective. An important distinction since it seems that SIE will use Portal as both a device to increase PS5's usage rate and as a wedge to steer mobile game purchases (would only be fully downloadable to non-Portal Android and iOS devices) PS Store's way; and have those purchases linked to PS Plus for Portal "Cloud Delivery" and cross-progression.
AI -- Long before AI became a hot topic of discussion, Kutaragi's take was that "one Cell or cluster of Cells can also function as a server; but whereas the present Internet mainly handles characters, applications on the Cell network will also handle semantics and reasoning". This was a hint at his intention to spark an AI revolution within SIE. Several years later the neighboring state of IBM would present its approach to training neural networks on CELL processors and a workaround for SPEs to compute training functions when bandwidth is limited. Kutaragi always thought ahead and occasionally pushed to do more than necessary for the glory of the empire. The latter is seen in architecture he chose for CELL, which foreshadowed AI accelerators. Its array of SPEs are SIMD dataflow units with support for 8-bit operations and SRAM connected to a high-bandwidth on-chip network that allows SPEs to access each others SRAMs directly. These are attributes of today's dedicated AI accelerators from IBM, Graphcore and others (last paragraph). "Enormous applications that require image processing and large-volume computing" were other CELL use cases he considered. A real-world example is Toshiba's SpursEngine variant that was used for Super Resolution video up-conversion in the image processing domain. Now two gens removed from PS3, the internet is abuzz with talk about PS5 Pro's claimed use of ML (specifically, the 300 TOPS of 8-bit computation for PSML). At minimum, the PS5 Pro's AI acceleration hardware will be Tempest Engine-like which means it too will trace back to the chip Kutaragi envisioned full of new age thinking. CELL continues to prove itself a valuable resource and wise expenditure of the empire's treasure.
Metaverse -- Ryan saw PS Home as "a very early manifestation of a platform metaverse". Ever the visionary, Kutaragi saw it as "only the beginning of what will come". In his mind's eye, what was to come (and still is) was a realm of make.believe-as-a-service illusions and spectacles to enchant the people. This realm wasn't a metaverse experience, it was a blended 'Cyber Society' experience. A mixed realm that "combines the real and the imaginary" with music, movies, games and other entertainment. The power to muster the realm's alchemy in cyberspace was to come from a CELL network. Likely, a network of petaFLOP class CELL supercomputers running ML, MR and other applications in conjunction with CELL based consoles distributed across the land. His was a grand vision that now aligns with emperor Kenichiro Yoshida's perception of the so-called "metaverse", and Sony's approach to it (Q2., Q3. and Q4). Kutaragi wasn't "kRaZy", he was clairvoyant and well-versed. One of his earliest insights into a MR cyberverse was recorded by a scribe who wrote that while he was waving his arm, he said:"This, this is the real broadband interface" (last sentence of the article Onslaught posted). Reality interfaces and the alchemy of reality synthesis have come in phases throughout the empire's existence. Phase 1 was Play, Groove, Chat and Kinetic for EyeToy, PS Eye with EyePet in S3D, PS Move and the PS3 Reality Synthesis (i.e. end-to-end 3D viewed in Stereoscopic 3D, driven by SPUs and the RSX GPU) VR experiments that gave rise to PS VR. Social VR experimentation, PS Camera and its associated Asobi/AR Bots, PS HD Camera and PS VR2/Sense controllers were Phase 2. Phase 3 is in follow ups to these experiences and peripherals. In particular, the next PS HMD (to be named PS XR…?) which the upcoming Sony XR HMD already solves for. In that day, Kutaragi's 'Cyber Society' will no longer be a concept of his imagination; rather a reality that his consoles (PS2/PS3) encouraged Magic Lab's magicians and Sony Corp.'s wizards to formulate.
Frankly, Kutaragi was wise beyond his years on the throne. The passage of time, brand/IP maturation and tech advancement across industries affirm his sweeping vision; and have allowed his successors to see what he saw decades earlier as they look to further build on the foundation he laid, while moving to extend the empire's reach into areas of interest he identified beyond the traditional pillars he set in place during his rule.
His greatest success is that he made the success of every SCE/SIE emperor before (Toshio Ozawa, Shigeo Maruyama, Teruhisa Tokunaka et al were largely titular heads, Kutaragi was at helm) and after him possible. Those who came before are beneficiaries of his gamble to build an empire. Those who came/come after are inheritors of provisions he made to ensure the empire's survival and competitiveness.
Here's to Ken Kutaragi, the man, the myth, the legend, "the Oracle", The G.O.A.T. May he continue to live long.
Long live the empire.
In the face of immense odds, Ken Kutaragi built an empire (SCE/SIE) that was the envy of the gaming world. Past and present emperors (CEOs) have contributed to the empire's success in their own notable ways, but none of their contributions exceed Kutaragi's. They've all led (Kutaragi included) the empire through challenging circumstances on the way to greater wealth, pivoted to other areas for growth, approved major acquisitions, forged partnerships, made exclusive deals, improved communications, consolidated silos, streamlined operations, cut costs and avoided pitfalls; but Kutaragi:
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