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President of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kutaragi, has been talking about the PlayStation 3 in an interview with Impress PC Watch. US website Gamespot translated some of the interview which sees Kutaragi talking a lot about the PlayStation 3’s capabilities as more than a games console. The key comment from him being that “The PlayStation [3] is not a game machine. We’ve never once called it a game machine.” It seems that Microsoft isn’t the only company looking for their next generation console to take over the living room.
“The PS3 is the product we have been aiming for since the establishment of SCEI,” said Kutaragi. “We haven’t been creating our [past] PlayStations for the sake of games. Our belief, and the motivation behind running our company, has been to [explore ways of] applying the power of computers to entertainment and enjoyment. We equipped the original PlayStation with a 3D graphics chip, and we equipped the PS2 with the Emotion engine. The PS3 isn’t designed to lean towards games. It’s not a computer for children. In the sense that our goal has been [to create] a computer that’s meant for entertainment, you could say that the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had existed as steps towards the PlayStation 3.”
Kutaragi wasn’t shy about discussing his rival’s next console: “I can understand the [Xbox 360’s] approach of adopting multiple, all-purpose processors. However, that will just raise integer calculation capabilities, and it will only benefit general applications. It will increase the machine’s capabilities as an all-purpose computer, but it won’t change the types of entertainment. On the other hand, the Cell (which is said to specialize in floating point calculations in comparison to normal CPUs) was created to ‘generate,’ or, in other words, to produce virtual objects and phenomenons inside the computer.” He went on to describe the Xbox 360 as an Xbox 1.5; a name that has been used a lot across internet forums since the unveiling of the 360 on MTV.
For a lot more on what Ken Kutaragi said about the PlayStation 3’s multimedia capabilities check out the extensive translation on Gamespot.
