The kickass soundtracks for various PS1 games after finding out they were tightly connected to Sony Music now makes a lot more sense. Ridge Racer Type 4 and Ape Escape come to mind. Spyro, et al
I know I am a nitpicking biased nerd, but also Final Fantasy. I don’t know crap about hardware, but the music for NES and SNES vs PS1 is like night vs day difference. I love both, but I also grew up listening to FF music as MP3 just because lol.
Yeah this is one of the few channels in my 10 years of watching youtube that I have been consistently checking for new videos on. Oh and only on the new videos even though I was a fan of the old ones as well.
As much as I hate overbearing corporations, it’s good to see how a conglomerate would leverage every aspect of the Company into creating an innovative product and aggressive business strategies.
Nintendo's aggressive monopoly lead to a lot of complacency. Nintendo 64 as a cartridge system in 1996 shows just how out of touch they were, not having a disk system until 2001 with the Gamecube!
@@cattysplat Nintendo even managed to screw that up with those tiny discs that made the drive incompatible with multimedia like the PS2 and Xbox could.
Sony has always been the one major console manufacturer that I never got into. Really interesting hearing their end of the story. I often wonder what would've happened had Nintendo not stabbed Sony in the back in favor of Phillips
From the sounds of it, Sony would've been deep into a partnership with Nintendo, but I feel a buyout would have been eventual given how much bigger of a company Sony was/is than Nintendo.
The gaming industry would be in a different place tham it is today. Microsoft would've never got into consoles, Nintendo would still be the biggest console maker and Sega would probably still be making consoles too
Its simple Nintendo was just looking for someone to make a cdrom addon Not someone to basically take over their business So ofcourse you bail out It was inevitable it was gonna happen regardless
@@mohammedganai9636 Nintendo could've still ended their business agreement in amicable terms, it was their betrayal that compelled Sony to enter the console business. Had something like that not happened and Sony execs would just cancel the project altogether
The big push on cd’s was a great move on sony’s part, the DAC on launch model PlayStations are actually borderline audiophile-tier so they still make as a fantastic CD player
The DAC in the launch model is pedestrian grade, budget stuff, an AK4309. At 84db THD+N and a DR of 90db, reaching short of CD's DR of 96db, it can be said to provide approximately 14-15 bits of effective resolution. It was a competent implementation, but not anyhow earth shattering, a Discman would have similar gear in it, and actual HiFi rackgear was on another level entirely. And it isn't uncommon of audiophiles to swoon over random pieces of flawed gear. The ear is a terrible instrument, auditory memory is very faulty and easily influenced by unrelated stimuli.
@@SianaGearz The ear is a terrible instrument, but that means you can discard 2 bits of sample depth and most people listening won't notice ;) As to why this is even a thing in the first place, I would hesitate to blame the traditional stereotype of audiophiles who spend $15,000 on speaker cables. They never struck me as the kind of people to respect gaming as an art or even hobby, much less give consoles the time of day as serious contenders against their precious high end gear they spent so much money on. They already have a preconception that it's worse, and proving that preconception wrong would be a blow to their pride and make them look stupid, so they would have little reason to even investigate the audio capabilities of the PlayStation in a serious manner. No, this is a rumor I think is birthed from people with a casual interest in audio, and have memories of the PlayStation specifically from their younger days. Compared to whatever stone age 1980s era players that might have been kicking around the living rooms of middle class America in the early 1990s, I could see a Playstation sounding better. Imagine some couple buys an early CD player for their living room in the 80s, then never buy another because they're freaking expensive and good enough. They have kids, and then eventually get a Playstation. That would be the first new CD player in the living room, and if little Timmy or Tammy is observant and curious, they might end up noticing small differences in how their music sounds on their PlayStation compared to Mom & Dad's old CD player. Maybe the Playstation just has a hotter output than the CD player (or something something broken pre emphasis...who knows?) so it is perceived as sounding better by consequence. Over time these memories get distorted (as you said, auditory memory is very faulty after all) by people with little technical understanding of what they're actually talking about and eventually make their way on the internet.
I remember I followed this channel for the fun technicals 'hack' to run game on low-end PC. So when I saw this amazing video, I was surprised. This is so well-made and so fun to follow. Not a simple retelling of history, but also presented in a fun and entertaining way. I'm gonna trace back and see how much amazing video I missed.
Yup, Nintendo stabbed both Atari and Sony in the back (and probably others as well), but only Sony managed to bounce back from Nintendo's betrayal and successfully bite them back.
Sony almost pulled a Daniel Plainview (the "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!" moment) on Nintendo. The contract would have hurt Nintendo big time, costing them their royalties, and Sony would likely have went their own way afterwards.
Nintendo screwed Sony by not splitting the license with them (similar contract as Sony and Philips on the CD license). Nintendo screwed Square on the development of SuperMarioRPG by taking the game away from them at the end and dubbing it a "developer" project hence they received no publishing fund. Big N's excuse was they weren't doing it right. Nintendo screwed Namco on the NES licensing fees. When NES hit the US who was still hurting from the console crash, no devs wanted to work on it. They gave Namco favorable licensing deal to port their very popular arcade games like Ms Pacman. After the NES hit it big they jacked up the terms. Sony, Namco and Square teamed together to release the Playstation. The box stated "Powered by Namco" and had pics of a dozen titles. Namco used the PS1 board in their arcade machine a year before release. Square convinced 20+ JRPG developers (Enix being the big one) to jump over to the Playstation platform.
Profit margins. I had wondered. Sony went from "Zero to Hero, in no time flat", to quote the song. I'd never have imagined it was off of the profit margins. But hey, the rest is history.
Everyone loves an underdog story. The only one who could remotely be considered one in this story would be Ken Kutaragi, and that might be pushing it a little. The contract clause for all final approval and royalty profits from disc based software was simply predatory though, and Sony as a conglomerate with its leverage was by no means the underdog. Nintendo might have been the loser had it went through with the deal. They made the mistakes of not reading the fine print when they first signed the contract for the SNES sound chip back in 1988, and their method of getting out of it. That said, there's one important inaccuracy: the court ordered the companies to go back and make nice, and they renegotiated and created a new form of the SuperDisc that would have been the media of the system, and more favorable terms that would give Nintendo royalties of all 3rd party disc based video games (Sony would get royalties for non-video game software). Sony still went their own way circa '93 after too many disagreements and created the PS One. It's important to surmise that Sony also would have had the possibility of a new media format (SuperDisc in this case) to profit off of, and they've been too happy to attempt so many times with them as primary if not sole proprietors (BetaMax, MiniDisc, UMD, Memory Stick Pro, BluRay). The one time that they succeeded was BluRay vs. HD-DVD, and even that was a pyrrhic victory, since downloads and streaming would take over. And as it turns out, in 1990, Sony released a disc based e-book reader using the intended media, the Sony Data Discman (Sony DD-1EX): forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=215476#p215476
@@mohammedganai9636 Well, MiniDisc was a partial victory if you include Europe and Japan, where it pretty much replaced tapes for portable audio. Prerecorded MiniDiscs still didn't sell well compared CDs ... but people _did_ copy songs to blank MiniDiscs, as a digital successor to mixtapes until MP3 players caught on. Here in North America though, MiniDisc never did catch on. People either stuck with tapes a bit longer, or got portable CD players. ...And got CD burners for their PCs once the cost of both had come down enough.
It makes a heck of a lot of sense especially working on Consumer Goods. I'm surprised it was accidental rather than intentional. Huge weakness by Nintendo to leave margin so low.
Kutaragi's father is one in a million a real angel, those are the dying words every son/daughter would give everything to hear, and never forget until death..
Wow I just found this channel and the production quality is off the CHARTS. the clean audio, the easy to follow scripting, the animations and editing... This is really good stuff mate
These episodes are so high quality I absolutely love them, you're awesome Alex! I have a question though, how is that when you search for information about the Sony DME-9000 on search engines you get no information at all? I'd love to know more about this product!
In early day of web, if there exists any mention of DME-9000, it is already gone with the disappearance of bulletin board sys, which require you to dial in to certain number. Plus, DME-9000 isn’t exactly a consumer product.
Ok wow! I didn't know that about the profit margins. I used to live in a small town which had two, maybe three electronics stores and only one of them was selling stuff like TVs. And they had a Playstation not just on display, it was constantly plugged in and you could walk in and play whatever videogame they had in it. There was always a line of kids going home from school who wanted to try it out. Now I actually understand why such a small store had a huge promo for the Playstation.
This part I am unclear on in this video. I thought playstation famously launched at $299 to counter the Saturn’s $399 price. I have never heard this $399 Playstation angle before.
Great times with the PS1, I had two consoles as a kid which was just unreal. It sucks that I eventually gave all that stuff away and don't have them anymore. Playing Gran Turismo 1 with my blue Mad Catz dual force controller was the best.
Not the Saturn, but Virtua Fighter. (wall of text incoming) As shown in the video, Kutaragi was a visionary who saw great potential for 3D games, but he received push-back from those around him who didn't. Not just from the corporate suits at Sony who were always breathing down his neck, but also from his new coworkers at Sony Computer Entertainment. The main mental hurdle was understanding what kind of games "3D games" could be. It's kind of hard to imagine now, but they lived in a world where, yeah there were 3D games, but they were very simple projects both in terms of visuals and content. Nintendo still had an uncontested stranglehold on Japan, and all of their most popular games were 2D. Like shown in the video, Shigeo Murayama understood that people would buy the hardware for the software. And while Kutaragi was passionate about 3D tech possibilities, he was unable to (effectively?) a vision of 3D software that would bring people in droves. But then SEGA released Virtua Fighter. LowSpecGamer mentioned that the VF arcade machine was super expensive, but he didn't mention that it was a massive hit on release and would go on to be SEGA's best selling arcade machine of all time. But I think the massive amount of money it made was less important than it's graphics. To put things in perspective, Virtua Racing came out in 1992, and while it was impressive tech wise, it didn't really have a ton going on visually. Especially not compared to hit 2D games from the same year like Sonic 2 and Final Fantasy V. But in Virtua Fighter, you had stuff like dynamic faces, realistic human anatomy, and a variety of martial arts moves and poses all presented using polygons. It also had different stages, camera angles, and lighting effects. It was a truly mind-boggling leap forward in graphics. I think it was that graphical leap and those massive profits that opened the eyes of the SCE employees to Kutaragi's vision. Whether or not that analysis is correct, the fact is that Virtua Fighter made them realize that Kutaragi was correct and that they needed to make a 3D console. Which, ironically, influenced SEGA's console engineers to also go for 3D. Even though VF should have influenced them before anyone else!
@@mohammedganai9636Yeah because Sega of Japan had a "Not built here" chip on their shoulder. Also stated that Sony knew nothing about video games. That led Sony to buy Psygnosis.
I can't tell how well made this is. I enjoy this kind of animation/documentaries... such an incredible job. Can't wait for the upcoming videos in that genre.
Well, prior to launch they changed the memory from 8 mb to 2 mb. That's a very big memory reduction. Some say Sony was betting the whole company on the Playstation success.
extremely well done. the core of the story told in with rhytm and accuracy ! animation on point and engaging. You clearly show their goal and we can fell the pressure of the project, the devotion of the heroes you present. you make your content informative as entertaining to me :D. no wonder why you take so long ! it's absolutly worth it
Many of us know the story behind Sony and Nintendo and what would eventually lead up to the PSX. But presented in this format, it reminded me of the Ford versus Ferrari Story that brought the creation of the Ford GT. Great video! This needs your take on the U.S. release of the console! 299
The secret sauce of the PlayStation stew was simple. A visionary hardware designer that managed to accomplish a lot with so little, experienced businessmen riding the ship, great allocation of company resources and a charismatic CEO at the helm. Many tech giants attempted to break into the game console market such as Phillips, but only one succeeded.
I'm a life long gamer starting with atari back in the early 80s. The PS1 was the first game console I bought on my own, it is still to this day my favorite console (well tied with the OG xbox), it had so many games. I spent hundreds of hours on Final Fantasy 7, breath of fire 3 and many other JRPGs. It was a great time to be a gamer.
I can’t believe how many huge developments began “in secret” not just in video games but in the automotive industry as well. The lesson being, don’t listen to your boss, work hard and COME PREPARED
The original Macintosh was suppose to use a 5.25in floppy drive but the designers hid a Sony employee in the offices as they worked on a driver for Sony's new 3.5 drive. So much work was being done on this driver that they loaded the firmware from the disk inserted. On old Mac if you insert a disk with the file .SONY it will cause it to crash since it cannot load the code. Eventually the company working on the 5.25 driver failed and they demo'd the 3.5 floppy to Jobs.
SONY even approach Tom Kalinske of Sega of America and agreed to go in 50/50 on the new PlayStation. SoA loved the idea and took it to their bosses in Tokyo. Tragically, Sega of Japan had gone insane at this point, rejecting the idea in what Kalinske aptly called, "The worst decision in the history of business." SEGA lost between $5-7 billion from this mistake and nearly went out of business when the PS2 was launched. SONY was a hardware company. SEGA was a software company.
I heard it was a similar story with Microsoft, originally Nintendo had tasked them with working on an online service for the Gamecube and MS had agreed but relations between the two broke down and the plan was scrapped with Nintendo doing their own online system and Microsoft decided to build their own console around the work they'd already done for the online service and thus the Xbox was born.
Back then, the people in charge really struggled to develop or even "be allowed" to publish the project at all, and today the PlayStation division is one of the most important sources of income for Sony.
Wow. Haven't been back to your channel in a long time. What an amazing difference. Kinda used to like those old videos I could relate to, trying to run games beyond my system specs but then one day I got a real gaming PC and a gaming Laptop and had no need to watch your channel any more. Your new content is AMAZING. I've watched many a RU-vidr present this bit of history and this BY FAR is THE BEST and most entertaining video presentation of this story I have ever witnessed. GREAT JOB! SUBSCRIBED!
Love the content, especially the way it is presented Comically. 😄 Kudo to the team who produced this episode. Awaiting for next one : the decade long reigme of PS2, the dystocia of PS3. Keep up the good work. Subbed & Liked.
I was complaining about LowSpecGamers new videos but they are growing on me (especially after that 6502 video) I hope to see a video that encourages Programming soon :D
I was shocked to find I wasn't already subscribed to you. I had seen some of your other documentaries in my suggestions, but must have forgot to subscribe. I'm subscribed now though.
I am glad you think so. The last 2 weeks of any video creation process we spend purely working on improving the flow of each video so it keeps attention going. It is a very meticulous process but it makes me happy to know it is working.
Your content is of exceptional quality; informative & entertaining, you have struck a strong balance between history and humor. I find your drawings and animations help to humanize the characters in your lectures. Seeing their emotive expressions makes it easy to empathize with the actual people behind the history.
There's a small oversight here. 1. The NES/Famicom was capable of PCM - Nintendo were already very familiar. 2. The NES/Famicom did not use FM synthesis.
Bad thing about your new schedule - I almost missed your video. RU-vid algorithm doesn't like it. Good thing about your new schedule - every new video is a small holiday. I may be 4 days late, but I've enjoyed it immensely. Also, you've convinced me, when salary comes I'm subscribing to Nebula and Curiosity stream. I want to see that gamepad story, for starters.
Another big benefit to the Play Station was how easy it was to program for. While the N64 had better overall processing power; It was difficult to optimize games to take full advantage of it. Ironically, the PS3 had this issue too. It was a very powerful system, but also very difficult to optimize for; Where as the Wii and XB360 were very easy to program for.
Awesome video based on the history of PlayStation with some based on the amazing read "Revolutionaries at Sony", great book that dives behind the curtain of highs and lows of PlayStation's inception. I'm so grateful Sony decided to get into the gaming industry, they truly were the upgrade the industry needed, in addition they also provide 1/3 of the healthy competition being part of the big 3 in gaming. Excellent video! Can't wait for the sequel coming up, keep the great quality standards!
Lucky for Sony they were able to keep using the name PlaySation after Nintendo dumped them. Talking about prices. Very long time ago I was walking around the PX and they had one of those price comparisons set up for the PS. $99.00 here $99.99 at the mall. I thought you have to be kidding me. Save a whole 99 cents. Whoop-de-poop. They should have included the part about having to pay sales tax at the mall. That would have been not spending $5.99 something. Plus the gas spent driving about ten miles down the road to the nearest store that had a PS.
Optical media wasn't the "superior format," it was simply the cheaper/higher capacity format. Solid state memory, predictably, returned as the preferred storage medium as cost and capacity have become more accessible.
I had no idea about the pricing issue. That's gold right there. Just goes to show what can happen when you don't try to max value extraction and squeeze the little guy on every business interaction.
The Famicom/NES doesn’t have FM Synthesis audio capabilities, only one Konami game had FM synth music on the Famicom because the cart contained a chip for that purpose
A few little memtions: 1)In 1993 it was founded Sony Computer Entertainment (I think the name Sony Interactive Entertainment was used in 2019) 2) The final price was $299, and the reveal of the price was made at E3 as a psedo-anti-competitive commercial against Sega Saturn which was priced as $399 (and yeah it's normal to do this since Sega used a lot of anti-competitive commercials towards Nintendo and also because Sony wanted to collab with Sega for creating the PlayStation but that's another story). For the rest I want to say I really liked the implication of f4mi (which was the main reason why I watched this video) and it's very interesting that I also didn't know a lot of facts from this video so at least I didn't found a lot of mistakes all I can say is well done. I enjoyed this video. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Good catch un number 1. I will add it to the corrections. Both me and my cowriter missed that. On number 2: $299 was the price... in the US! In Japan it sold for ¥39,800 which was at the exchange rate at the time a bit over $400. From what I can tell (Reiji Asakura's book is very poor on what happened after the Japan launch) they corrected their "mistake" on the retailer cut but the time it reached the US and cut the pricing to $299. I will add a clarification to the correction area.
@LowSpecGamer thank you for answering me. I appriciate this. As for the first affirmation I need to say that I documented myself and I found that the "Sony Interactive Entertainment" name was since april 2016😁🙂
4:41 Ah I have my Yamaha MSX with Road Fighter, Final Justice, Memory and Typing(arabic cartridges) games. The only keyboard console hybrid my dad bought me as a kid. 😍😍 And then Mom bought me a Famicom after the Atari game days. 5:12 nuuuu! 😭😭
Woops! I actually have tremendous respect for the MSX and knew that animation of it on the trash would ruffle some feathers. It was a great format! I just needed to make a visual reference to how quickly Ken's kid made a judgement
theses new style videos are so high quality I love it. But what happened to your old videos why did u unlist them? its only accessible from the comment u made on the "new lowspecgamer" video
I still have my original PlayStation. None of the cables though to connect it that I can find. I still believe the PSX has an aesthetic that is so simple yet beautiful for a first time console
Ps2 and ps3 video cables can actually work on the ps1 if you squeeze them into place hard enough :P (at least.. the rca jack cables) My ps1 is so old that I have NO CHOICE but to make it share the same video cable as my ps3
I get comments about the accent and it always surprises me. I regularly interact with people with much, much more complicated accents. Even with native speakers from places like northern England I would argue they are harder to understand for a global audience. I don't know how much this is a factor. What the data is telling me in analytics is that simply people are still not clicking the video enough when recommended (which has nothing to do with an accent) and everything to do with the fact that I have no reputation in a vertical in RU-vid that has many, many high quality established creators. Only way I can change that is to keep improving my thumbnails, keep rising the video quality and hope people will slowly notice.
The divorce of Nintendo from the Sony PlayStation project due to the fact that Nintendo cheated on Sony themselves with Phillips (leading Nintendo to license lackluster Mario and Zelda game titles to the Phillips CD-i), led to Sony's Digital Pictures to side with Nintendo's rival Sega for some Sega CD projects only before Sony upset Sega at E-3 when the Sony PlayStation was announced to be $100 cheaper than the Sega Saturn at launch. Strike two for Sega. First strike for Sega was the 32X 32-bit add-on for the Genesis/Mega Drive and the third strike was when Sega's Dreamcast lacked a DVD playback ability which the PlayStation 2 had...Sega had finally struck out by 2001, Sega is now opting to be a third-party licensee for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, licensing the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog to each console.
Note Sega rejected partnership with Sony cause "what do they know about video games" Sega of Japan. Sega rejected working with SGI cause it wasn't built in Japan, that SGI tech went into the N64.
Hey, just a heads up, don't click the link for the curiosity/nebula bundle because it doesn't give you the discount or access to nebula. You have to copy paste into a browser. I lost 21.99 usd and no access to nebula to see the side quests 😢
Just want to jump in and say I love EVERYTHING you've been doing since the change up!! These are wonderfully done passion projects each and every video!
