Ken Kutaragi claims everyone at Sony thought the PlayStation would fail

Former SIE president and the man often referred to as “the father of the PlayStation,” Ken Kuturagi, has claimed that everyone at Sony thought the PlayStation would fail.

Speaking at the Tokyo Game Show this week, Kutaragi spoke about his ambition to enter the gaming hardware space in the mid-90s.

“We wanted to share the passion,” Kuturagi told the audience. “We wanted to hear their expectations 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.

“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.”

Since leaving Sony in 2007, Kutaragi has sat on the boards of e-commerce firm Rakuten, app developer SmartNews and GA Technologies, which runs an AI-powered real estate listings website.

Kutaragi is best known as the architect of the original PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. The engineer departed Sony in 2007 following the challenging launch of the third console, which is estimated to have initially cost Sony billions in losses.

Kutaragi has remained at Sony as senior technology advisor.

Kutaragi is perhaps best known for his hubristic statements during the era of PlayStation’s first three consoles, including referring to Xbox 360 as “just an Xbox 1.5″ and suggesting that PlayStation fans should work longer hours to be able to afford a $599 PS3.