Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.

Hey there and welcome to TechStuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an

executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things Tech and today we

are going to pick up where we left off with the episode about

the birth of the PlayStation and here is the story so far. I covered in that recent

episode how Ken Kutaragi, the so-called father of the PlayStation,

had to develop Sony's first video game console, essentially out of view of the company's board members who were more keen on

pursuing a collaboration with Nintendo at the time, but the Nintendo partnership

never produced a consumer product and I'm not even sure if there were ever

any working prototypes that came out of this project because Nintendo kind of killed

it all off without ever making an official announcement about the program being

cancelled.

Kuduragi was confident that Sony could build a CD-ROM-based video game system

as opposed to Nintendo's cartridge-based system that would not just compete but would

outperform the competition. Now it almost wasn't called the PlayStation by the way.

Kuduragi wanted to call it that. In fact that was the name of the proposed

Nintendo and Sony peripheral for the Super Nintendo, though at that time that version of the

PlayStation was two words, Play Station, and Kuturagi won to create a game

console called PlayStation, one word, Big P, Big S.

When Sony CEO Norio Oga gave the thumbs up, it was going to be called PlayStation.

Sony had already even registered the name.

Everything was ready to go.

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