Inside The Playstation
Industry veterans, including Mark Cerny, Mike Daily and Chris Roberts explain how Sony’s debut console pushed the industry forward
Few consoles can claim to have revolutionised videogames in the way that the Playstation did.
Sony’s brand power and marketing clout widened the console market demographic and ended the dominance of its traditional games-focused competitors. But it wasn’t just a marketplace revolution – the Playstation was an exceptional piece of technology, coupled with an approach to third-party development that supported a huge range of hit games.
As many of you will know, Sony’s decision to enter the console market dates back to its work with Nintendo on the SNES. Sony created the sound chip for the console and then developed the add-on Super Disc CD-ROM format for the system. However, disagreements over CD software licensing caused Nintendo to abandon Sony in favour of Philips. The engineer central to all of this was Ken Kutaragi, who used this incident to convince executives to back his work on a Sony console. Rather than competing with the SNES and other established machines, Sony would eventually develop a 3D-capable console, inspired by the success of Virtua Fighter in Japanese arcades.
The simple fact that a company of Sony’s stature was taking an interest in the console market was a noteworthy development in itself. “It was a big part of us getting started,” says Lorne Lanning of Oddworld Inhabitants. “Sony was a company that really made quality hardware, and it was an entertainment company as well – it owned movie studios and record labels. Sega and Nintendo weren’t that. The idea that a wide spectrum multimedia entertainment company was stepping in was really interesting, and it was happening right at that time when the industry was projected to have tremendous growth.”
First impressions count, and Playstation developers remember the impact that the system made when they first laid eyes on it. “It was in
Las Vegas at CES; Ken Kutaragi was personally doing developer PR for the new console,” says Mark Cerny, then president of Universal Studios’ videogames division. “He had a nifty demo of a walking dinosaur, and it was absolutely clear that this was the beginning of something very special indeed.” Mark wasn’t the only person to be
“it Was absolutely clear That This Was The beginning of something very special indeed...” mark cerny Players might have loved sony’s console debut, but Thanks To its REVOLUTIONARY HARDWARE DESIGN, developers loved it just as much. We speak To Playstation developers To find out What made it such a joy To Work With Words by Nick Thorpe
impressed by this particular demo. “It would have been about 1994 and I received a phone call from Phil Harrison, someone that I had commissioned to write some game designs in the late Eighties,” recalls Charles Cecil of Revolution Software. “Phil told me that he was working for Sony and they were planning to launch a new console, codenamed PSX – would I like to come down to their offices to take a look? Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. A few days later they showed a demo of a dinosaur moving in 3D and we were absolutely blown away.”
“I first saw the PSX at a Sony developer conference prior to launch in 1995, they had a few demos running – and Ridge Racer,” remembers Mike Dailly, then working at DMA Design. “Being a huge Ridge Racer fan (I even have the arcade machine), I was blown away that it was virtually identical to the arcade version, which only appeared a year or so before! They also had a T-rex demo controllable via a gamepad which also looked very cool. Such a small machine, so much power – it was an instant hit with me.” The famous dinosaur demo was an impressive display of a detailed character that could be controlled in real time, but Ridge Racer is arguably the more important indicator of the kind of leap Playstation offered. The arcade game, released in October
1993, was revolutionary in its own right thanks to its introduction of texture-mapped polygons. That the Playstation came close to an arcade game running on considerably more costly hardware, just one year and two months later, was a minor miracle.
This was all the more impressive considering what other 3D-capable consoles offered. “At the time, the only remotely comparable hardware was the 3DO, but that was just too expensive from the get-go and outside of PCS with the newly fangled graphics cards the Playstation was a game changer,” says Paul Hughes, who worked at EA and Warthog during the Playstation years. “The Sega Saturn was probably its closest rival but was a real bugger to program – you really had to get deep down and dirty to get close to Playstation.” This assessment is confirmed by Chris Roberts, who worked on Sega’s console prior to moving
“Playstation, like all consoles To come, had its OWN idiosyncrasies To deal With” Paul hughes
to Sony’s Liverpool studio. “First time I saw [the] Playstation was while working at Silicon Dreams in Banbury – I’d been hired to work on Sega Saturn and was pretty jealous of the guys working on Playstation,” remembers the coder. “The Saturn was technically challenging, but still cool in its own way, but when I got chance to take a console home for the weekend I didn’t choose the Saturn.”
The key to all of this was the Playstation’s custom
graphical hardware. The Geometry Transformation Engine was a dedicated 3D graphics coprocessor, residing within the system’s CPU. “The big draw for the Playstation was the really quick turnaround to get something up on screen and the raw 3D performance compared to the Saturn and even PC games of the time,” explains Chris. “This was the era of Quake and Descent and very early PC GPUS (along with the primitive versions of Directx) so most developers were still having to write custom triangle renderers on fairly expensive PCS to see any kind of useful performance.
We had folks in the office running Quake with a huge border to try and get the framerate acceptable.”
“Unlike other machines of its time, it was a dedicated triangle renderer, using a constant delta texturing system which allowed a high throughput of polygons,” explains Mike. “Although it gave a slightly coarser texture mapping, it didn’t matter once things were moving. Other systems like the Sega Saturn and 3DO just couldn’t keep up, it was an amazing piece of work.” In fact, the Playstation didn’t just beat its counterparts. Though it didn’t have quite the same raw polygon-pushing power of the likes of the Model 2 arcade board, it was easier to work with in other ways. For example, the Playstation offered full colour texture mapping, where the Model 2 board could only modify coloured polygons with greyscale textures.
“It was also able to blend textures and featured true semi transparency which even Sega’s arcade boards couldn’t do at the time,” notes Martin Edmondson, formerly of Reflections. “It was truly cutting edge.”
“Playstation, like all consoles to come, had its own idiosyncrasies to deal with in order to get the best performance,” Paul
adds. “Nonetheless it was still a boon to be able to offload texturing, lighting and blending to the GTE and video to the MDEC processor.” For David Perryman of Attention To Detail, these idiosyncrasies had to be corrected by hand when working on Rollcage. “I spent time stitching together polygons. The engine we’d developed was unbelievably fast, but the nature of it meant that a lot of design work was needed to ensure the polygon meshes transitioned well between profiles. Otherwise there was a tendency for it to split as it switched between levels of detail. This was visible to the player as holes appearing ahead.”
Though the Playstation’s graphics hardware was revolutionary, it wasn’t perfect. “The lack of perspective correction and Z-buffering on the textured polygons (something which the later Nintendo 64 featured in hardware) could make things visually very ugly with fighting polygons and warping textures,” says Martin, whose observation was common amongst our interviewees. “Solving it in software was possible, to a certain extent, but [it was] extremely polygon expensive.” Chris Roberts adds to that the unusual graphical memory setup, which was split into texture pages. “The VRAM was also a bit of a chore – when developing the original Wipeout, the team had opted to write a visual VRAM editor so that the artists could hand-place textures and colour palettes,” he explains. “The tool was nice enough but it was a unnecessary job for the artists so it wasn’t long before we knocked together an automatic allocator.”
Of course, the Playstation still offered 2D games, and even some devs working with 3D graphics chose to exploit the hardware’s 2D capabilities. The primary reason for this was that despite the Playstation’s strengths, its real-time rendering capabilities paled in comparison to what was possible in the VFX industry. “We had extensive experience of 3D computer graphics. What I knew, due to polygonal resolution, texture mapping, memory footprint and all that stuff was that overall the 3D quality of the Playstation in the scheme of computer graphics would be pretty lame looking,” says Lorne, and he’d know – both he and Oddworld Inhabitants cofounder Sherry Mckenna had worked on visual effects in the film industry. “To the gamer, it was a novelty to have 3D. On the Playstation, the first Tomb Raider was the best usage of extremely limited computer graphics at the time. They really did a lot right to get the best image quality you could get in those days.”
However, Lorne and the team at Oddworld Inhabitants wanted to make something that looked good – not just good for a videogame. “For me it was like, ‘Our graphics can be much better than the 3D rendering of the day, but it’s going to have to be played in 2D.’ When I told my partner that she was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about, it’s going to be a 2D game? We do 3D graphics,’ and I was like, ‘Trust me,’” recalls Lorne. Fortunately, the market for such an approach was proven early on in development. “We were in production and already running on Abe’s Oddysee when Donkey Kong Country came out, and it was like, ‘Oh, perfect – they just showed us a couple more tricks that we could learn from.’ They made the same choice – they said, ‘If we prerender the characters and the backgrounds, we’ll get that really 3D look but it’ll just be being pushed as sprites.’ We could prebuild everything in Maya, we could render it out in whatever resolution we wanted, and then we could scale it down to make it fit.” Many devs would ultimately use some amount of prerendering for their games, although often this would be mixed with real-time 3D. This
“The real step change here Was The switch from assembler To c” chris roberts
meant real-time 3D elements on top of prerendered backgrounds, as seen in the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy series, though occasionally games like Klonoa used prerendered sprites on real-time 3D backgrounds as well.
Though few other parts of the Playstation were as revolutionary as its graphics hardware, the rest of the console’s design was still driven by smart choices. The MIPS CPU was generally well liked, with Mike commenting that, “I still have the full MIPS ROM I wrote somewhere, and MIPS remains my favourite chip/assembler to this day!” Chris was also a fan. “I was already pretty familiar with 32-bit ARM assembler, so in some ways the MIPS and Hitachi processors in the Playstation and Saturn were a small step backwards, but both of these were fun processors.” However, he does note,
“The real step change here was the switch from assembler to C which vastly improved development in general.” The sound processor was much like the SNES sound processor developed by Kutaragi. It was capable of generating music from compressed digital samples, but could play 24 channels
of audio simultaneously and had 512KB memory, compared to the eight channels and 64KB memory of its predecessor. Though this was of diminished importance due to the ability to play audio from the game CD, it was often used in games where disc space was at a premium.
David does point out one area in which the console was severely limited: “Memory constraints were also a challenge, trying to fit everything into what Playstation gave us. But I think all the constraints honed the design, without them it would have been easier to come up with a less tight design.” Mike confirms this, noting, “It could have done with a bit more RAM, but most developers made it work.” With 2MB main RAM, 1MB for video and 512KB for sound, the Playstation was comparable to its primary competitors, the Saturn and N64. However, both of those machines received 4MB RAM expansions during their lifetimes. In both cases the expansions were typically used for graphical improvements with the Saturn typically using the extra RAM for better animation in 2D games, and the N64 using it for greater 3D performance. Only a small minority of games on either platform strictly required the use of these expansions, which ultimately limited their impact – and by not releasing such an upgrade, Sony did avoid fracturing its customer base.
The other main area in which the Playstation was a leap forward was in its adoption of CD-ROM technology. The benefits of CD-ROM for games had long been known, as the medium offered huge capacity and cheap production costs as compared to cartridges. For Sony, it was an obvious move – not only had it codeveloped the CD with Philips, it was already ordering millions of them through its music division. However, it wasn’t a move without risk. Though console manufacturers had been experimenting with CD-ROM add-ons since 1988 and most manufacturers of next-generation consoles had adopted it, it was an expensive technology that drove up the initial hardware cost. What’s more, the industry giant Nintendo had chosen to stick with ROM cartridges, citing their speed, durability and resistance to piracy.
Choosing CD-ROM would prove fruitful for both Sony and its
roster of developers. For Lorne, CD-ROM was essential to the creation of the Oddworld games. “That was part of the reason for choosing to get into games at that time, just that games were going to CD-ROM storage devices. When CD-ROM came out, it was like, ‘Ooh, well that’ll hold enough memory that you can have 500 screens for the game, 1,000 frames of animation for each character,’ you weren’t looking at the limitations of a cartridge.” Broken Sword was another game that reaped the benefits of CD-ROM. “The CD storage was very important because the game had large assets – multilayered backgrounds, huge amounts of sprite animation, and hours of music and speech. Without the CD storage, we would have had to compress the assets considerably which would have compromised the gameplay experience,” recalls Charles, though he’s also frank about the disadvantages of the medium. “Of course, CD
“Without The cd storage, We Would have had To compress The assets considerably” charles cecil
players in those days were slow at reading data, so load times were quite high and videos really did need to be compressed hard in order to stream in real time.”
There’s no doubt that CD-ROM helped Sony to win victory in this generation. Developers preferred it, most famously Squaresoft, which felt that the N64’s cartridges didn’t offer the capacity necessary to realise its vision for Final Fantasy VII. The cheap production costs also allowed for tactical discounting, such as when Sony introduced the Platinum range of games – older hit games at
£19.99 – at the same time as the N64 hit the market. However, CD-ROM was also one of Playstation’s weaknesses. Part of the problem was that it caused hardware reliability issues. The drive lens travelled along plastic rails in early models, which would be worn away by friction until the lens began to dip, causing loading problems (often first experienced as stuttering FMV). The other problem was that as CD copiers became commonplace in the late Nineties, piracy became such a problem that the standard copy protection was no longer enough, and developers had to include extra anti-piracy measures in their games.
With such exciting hardware, it’s unsurprising that developers wanted to work on the Playstation. In the early days, that meant competition. “Reflections had a long publishing history with Psygnosis (who had recently been purchased by Sony) through our previous catalogue of games. But even though the dev kits were on the ground we still needed a compelling design to secure one for ourselves. In fact, we were in stiff competition for those early kits with quite a few other studios, and Sony’s internal dev teams too of course.” explains Martin, who had one of the few Uk-developed games ready for the console’s European launch. “I remember showing the Destruction Derby concept to them and they were thankfully excited so we bagged a dev kit soon after that. I remember those earliest dev kits were almost [like a]photocopier in size, but were soon replaced with more convenient units the size of an old VHS recorder.”
For all the revolutionary hardware, perhaps the biggest step forward was Sony’s treatment of third-party developers, and this is what allowed Destruction Derby to hit a tight deadline. “It may have been considered ‘early’ by some but it still only left us with seven or eight months until the machine’s European launch so everything was extremely tight,” Martin continues. “We worked fast and such was the well-designed hardware and libraries that within a day we had a textured polygon spinning around on the screen, and not even a week later a circular track with a demo car flying around it. Then the hard work began on the physics for the crashes, AI and so on.”
Martin isn’t the only one who enjoyed Sony’s approach. “Up until that point you got generally got a fat document with a couple of tersely documented examples and then it was pretty much over to you until you submitted your project,” explains Paul. “Unless you were a serious player in the industry with connections right to the top of the totem, developer support was pretty basic at best. Sony really led the revolution; they realised that helping (and listening to) the developers benefitted their platform.” In fact, Sony wasn’t just open to commercial developers. While it certainly wasn’t cheap, the Net Yaroze scheme
allowed hobbyist coders to make their own Playstation games. Many of these appeared on the demo discs of Official Playstation Magazine, and launched the careers of a number of developers.
Still, not everything was wholly transparent, as Sony initially seemed reluctant to let developers fully exploit the Playstation’s graphics hardware. “The powerful 3D math engine was hidden behind a library, which meant that anyone serious about creating virtual worlds needed to have the real documentation leaked to them,” says Mark. “Luckily that happened rather early on in the development of Crash Bandicoot, and we were able to create some amazing environments and characters!” The same thing happened to Chris and his team in Liverpool. “I remember a Sony conference in London that happened while we were working on Wipeout 2097, and one of the presenters was talking about the COP2 instructions (responsible for 3D vector maths) and how you shouldn’t call them directly. I recall shifting uncomfortably in my seat since we’d been using these pretty much non-stop from the outset,” he confirms. “I’ve no idea why this restriction was there or where our COP2 instruction list came from, but Sony did eventually make these public.”
What’s more, eventually the machine was so well documented that it became possible to get by without the help of Sony. “By the time I got to actually code a game on the PSX – and not just mess with a dev kit, I had moved to Visual Sciences and it had been out for a while, so you didn’t really need Sony for tech support. I got vast amounts of info from the net,” recalls Mike. This enabled him to take a very creative approach to increasing the amount of development hardware available to his colleagues. “I reprogrammed an Action Replay into a dev kit, and even did a snapshot cart for it. I was able to give all the artists ‘dev kits’ via a £10 cart so they could see their art on the TV, and even QA were able to get one and used it when the
game crashed, downloading the whole program onto the PC so a coder could then upload it and find out where it crashed. It was great fun!”
Of course, making the most of all of this new hardware meant that game development changed fundamentally, with more manpower required to get things done. “In the very earliest days our team size only increased from four (Commodore Amiga) to seven for Playstation so it wasn’t a huge increase initially. This was partly due to the relatively pared-back design of Destruction Derby, there simply wasn’t time for hugely complex and deep games to make the launch window,” Martin recalls. “This all changed rapidly for the next releases however, we had around 30 or so working on Driver. ” But despite the increased overall labour demand, the Playstation reduced the need for some skillsets. “This wasn’t just moving to a new platform, this was the move from 2D to 3D. This was a seismic shift as artists and coders needed to learn a whole new set of tools and technology. Teams ballooned in size, and many found themselves unable to keep up,” explains Mike. “DMA had to let several good 2D artists go as they just couldn’t make the transition, and coders had to learn to use proper 3D maths, from points, vectors and matrices, to 3D model formats and DMA pipelines. It was a brutal switch.”
Still, the Playstation era’s teams were smaller than those making
games today. “I miss the small team sizes it afforded – and from that, flexibility,” says David. “When we were building the final ‘Alpha’ submission for Rollcage Stage II, it was late at night and a few of us were there. I’d been plagued by a design problem for months: how to soften the blow when players were beaten over the line after being out in front for a long time. Geoff Browitt was ready to make the final build and made the mistake of asking if there was anything else to go in. It was at that point the idea of the Total Racing points system was born – Geoff knew there were hooks into all the game’s events and with Gavin Cooper we thrashed out the details and got a new game mode in at the last minute.”
That’s what makes the Playstation era so exciting – a combination of boundaries being pushed and teams that were still small enough to be able to take risks. And as Mark reminds us, the result of all that is an extraordinarily diverse library of games. “The technology was great, of course, but I think what Playstation did best was unleash the frustrated creativity of the games community. Suddenly, anything could be a game… Parappa The Rapper, or Devil Dice, or Intelligent Qube – these are some of my favourite Playstation memories.” Though the Playstation conquered the console industry with a combination of power and ease of programming, its successors did not follow the same path. The PS2 was considered difficult to work with, and the PS3 even more so. “We’d hoped that Playstation 4 would make it a bit easier to make games, particularly as it came after the Playstation 3 which was such a beast to tame,” says Mark. “What I didn’t foresee is that once games were easier to bring to the console, there would be a return to the variety of game experiences that made the early Playstation years so remarkable.”
Mark is right. The Playstation was great to work with – and when life is easy for developers, there are fewer barriers to trying new things. It offered something for everyone, whether that was arcade conversions and Japanese oddities, the Harry Potter and dancing games your younger sibling liked, or the football and racing games that were just realistic enough to catch your dad’s attention. Without the extraordinary technology, that diversity wouldn’t have been possible – and we might’ve found ourselves still waiting for the first console to reach 100 million players.
“This WASN’T just moving To a NEW Platform, This Was The move from 2d To 3d” martin edmondson