Sony | Code Like It's 198x

Sony tried three times to get into games before the PlayStation made it one of the biggest names in them. In the 1980s it built MSX home computers. At the end of the decade it designed the sound chip inside Nintendo’s Super Famicom and agreed to build that console a CD-ROM drive. In June 1991 Nintendo walked away from the CD deal in front of the world’s press. Sony answered with a console of its own, and when the PlayStation reached Japanese shops on 3 December 1994, Edge called it “the hardware launch of the decade”. In the same launch coverage the magazine judged that Sony’s earlier forays into games, starting with “the abortive MSX home computer standard”, had “not been great successes”.

Fast facts

Founded: 7 May 1946 in Tokyo, by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo; named Sony from 1958.
Home computers: the HitBit range of MSX machines; the 64K HB-75 sold in Britain for £299 in 1984.
Sound chip: the Super Famicom’s sound unit, designed by Ken Kutaragi.
Games business: Sony Electronic Publishing, set up in New York by 1991, with its games label Sony Imagesoft; Sony Computer Entertainment, set up in Tokyo in 1993 and renamed Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2016.
Consoles: PlayStation (1994), PlayStation 2 (2000), PSP (2004), PlayStation 3 (2006), PS Vita (2011), PlayStation 4 (2013), PlayStation 5 (2020).
Studio bought in 1993: Psygnosis of Liverpool, for £30 million.

The HitBit

MSX was a shared standard for home computers, announced in Tokyo in June 1983, and Sony was one of the many electronics companies that built machines to it. Every MSX had the same Z80 processor, Texas Instruments video chip, General Instrument sound chip and Microsoft BASIC, so a cartridge for one ran on all of them. Makers competed on what they added, and Sony added software in ROM. When Your Computer explained MSX to British readers in January 1984, it singled out the “Sony Hit-Bit MSX micro” for its built-in database program.

The HitBit reached British shops later that year. In November 1984 Computer & Video Games lined up the MSX machines on sale in Britain: Sony’s HB-75 cost £299 for 64K, with two joystick ports, a printer port and two cartridge slots, and an 8K utility ROM holding address book, memo and scheduling programs. A data cartridge could store what they held. A British advertisement that month sold the feature as a “Personal Data Bank”, with a Sony Trinitron television to plug the computer into. Sony published cartridge games for the HitBit too; Your Computer had reviewed its maze game Sparkie in January.

MSX never took hold in Britain the way it did in Japan and the Netherlands, but the HitBit had a working life in British games all the same. When Peter Johnson converted Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu II for Ocean, he worked from a Japanese MSX cartridge of the game and “an imported Sony MSX HitBit computer”. Sony carried on into the later MSX generations: in 1990 a Dutch importer was advertising a Sony MSX2+.

The sound chip and the Nintendo deal

Sony’s next route into games ran through Nintendo. Nintendo asked Sony’s audio research division for a sound chip for the Super Famicom, and the engineer who designed it was Ken Kutaragi, who would later lead the PlayStation. Both Edge, in 1995, and Retro Gamer’s history of the PlayStation name him as the chip’s designer. The Super Nintendo entry explains how the unit worked: an 8-bit SPC700 processor with its own 64K of memory, driving a digital signal processor that played eight voices of sampled sound. Edge reported that Sony kept the rights to programming the chip and “charged Nintendo excessive fees” for the information Nintendo’s developers needed.

In 1988 the two companies agreed that Sony would build a CD-ROM drive for the Super Famicom, and Sony planned a console of its own that would play both Super Famicom cartridges and a new CD format, the Super Disc. Sony called it the PlayStation. In June 1991, the day after Sony announced the machine at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Nintendo told its own press conference that it would work with Philips instead. The PlayStation entry tells the story in full, from two independent accounts: David Sheff’s Game Over and Edge’s launch feature of February 1995.

The same month, ACE interviewed Olaf Olafsson, the 29-year-old president of Sony Electronic Publishing, a new New York company set up to make games and multimedia from the films and music Sony owned: Columbia Pictures and Sony Music, formerly CBS Records. Olafsson said Sony would make games based on its films Hook and Hudson Hawk, with Ocean publishing them in Europe, and that the company was not tied to any format. “We would publish games on potato chips if it made sense,” he said. ACE also passed on industry talk that the Super Famicom CD drive Sony was making would cost just under ¥100,000.

Sony Imagesoft

Sony Electronic Publishing’s games label was Sony Imagesoft, the new name for a business Sony already owned, CSG Imagesoft. ACE named CSG Imagesoft’s first hit as Solstice for the Nintendo Entertainment System, written by Software Creations in Manchester. Most of what followed was film licences, and they did not help Sony’s reputation. In 1995 Edge wrote that Sony Electronic Publishing, established in 1991, had “seen its reputation plummet with the release of sub-standard cartridge games like Last Action Hero and Cliffhanger”. Retro Gamer later made the same judgement of the same two games, calling them “half-baked movie licences”.

Sony Computer Entertainment

Sony set up Sony Computer Entertainment in Tokyo in 1993, jointly with Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), to make the new console. The machine that surfaced late in 1993 as the PS-X was a dedicated games console with no cartridge slot. Retro Gamer’s account has Kutaragi arguing that a 16-bit machine tied to Nintendo was a dead end. Sony’s president, Norio Ohga, first met his proposal with derision, until Kutaragi asked whether Sony’s pride could let it walk away after the way Nintendo had treated it. Other senior executives still thought video games were toys for children, and the console was styled to look like a piece of hi-fi and video equipment instead.

Sony had no established in-house games division, as Edge pointed out, so from late 1993 it set about recruiting other people’s. By the Japanese launch, Edge counted more than 250 companies signed up and some 700 development stations shipped. Namco wrote Ridge Racer for the launch and built arcade boards on the same hardware, and Konami was working on a dozen PlayStation games. SCE’s slogan, which Edge quoted and Retro Gamer attributed to its director Akira Sato, was “If it’s not realtime, it’s not a game”, a dig at the full-motion-video games of the CD machines before it.

Sony had also bought a studio. In June 1993 it paid £30 million for Psygnosis in Liverpool, a purchase Edge said many people had questioned. Psygnosis’s WipEout was the best-selling game when the PlayStation reached Europe in September 1995. The console went on sale in Japan on 3 December 1994 at ¥39,800, in North America on 9 September 1995 at $299, and in Europe on 29 September 1995, at £299 in Britain. Sony counts more than 102.4 million sold.

In 1997 Sony let the public program it too, with Net Yaroze, a black PlayStation sold with a C compiler and Sony’s libraries; Edge credited the idea to Kutaragi.

Later consoles

The PlayStation 2 followed on 4 March 2000 in Japan, at the same ¥39,800. It played DVD films and ran the older machine’s games on the original PlayStation processor, which it kept on board as its input/output chip, and Sony counts more than 160 million sold, more than any console before it. The PSP, Sony’s handheld console, went on sale in Japan in December 2004 at ¥19,800, about a week after Nintendo’s DS.

The PlayStation 3 launched in Japan on 11 November 2006 and in the United States six days later. Edge wrote that delays and shortages had given Sony’s American head, Kazuo Hirai, “a tricky year”, which he ended by replacing Kutaragi as president of Sony Computer Entertainment. The PS Vita handheld arrived in Japan on 17 December 2011 and in most other countries in February 2012. The PlayStation 4 was announced at £349 and $399, undercutting Microsoft’s Xbox One, and launched in November 2013.

Sony’s studios changed too. It closed Studio Liverpool, the former Psygnosis, in August 2012, after seventeen years of WipEout games. In April 2016 Sony Computer Entertainment merged with Sony’s network business to become Sony Interactive Entertainment, based in San Mateo, California. The PlayStation 5 followed in November 2020. Sony’s published figures give the PlayStation 3 more than 87.4 million sales, the PlayStation 4 more than 117 million and the PSP more than 76.4 million.

Sources

Your Computer, January 1984: the MSX standard explained, the Sony Hit-Bit’s built-in database, and a review of Sony’s Sparkie cartridge. November 1984: advertisement for the Sony Hit Bit (“Personal Data Bank”) and a Sony Trinitron television.
Computer & Video Games issue 37, November 1984, p. 54: MSX machines on sale in Britain (Sony HB-75, £299, 64K, ports and slots, the utility ROM programs and data cartridge).
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 204–205: Peter Johnson on converting Yie Ar Kung-Fu II from a Japanese cartridge and an imported Sony HitBit.
MSX Computer Magazine (Netherlands) issue 40, September 1990: Sony MSX2+ advertisement.
Edge issue 17, February 1995, PlayStation feature, pp. 57–60: Sony’s MSX “abortive”, its forays “not great successes”; Kutaragi and the Super Famicom sound chip, and the fees; the 1988 CD-ROM agreement, the Super Disc and the 1991 CES; PS-X in late 1993; over 250 companies and some 700 development stations; Namco and Konami; Sony Electronic Publishing’s reputation, Last Action Hero and Cliffhanger; the Psygnosis purchase for £30 million and the doubts about it; SCE’s “realtime” slogan. The launch report (pp. 6–7) and “the hardware launch of the decade” (editorial).
Retro Gamer, Videogames Hardware Handbook volume 2 (2010), “Retroinspection: PlayStation”: Kutaragi as designer of the SNES sound chip; the formation of Sony Computer Entertainment; Kutaragi’s case to Ohga; the executives who saw games as toys; the console’s styling; Akira Sato’s “If it’s not real-time, it’s not a game”; Sony Imagesoft’s “half-baked movie licences such as Cliffhanger and Last Action Hero”.
Rik Haynes, “Sony video games, you’ve got to be joking!”, ACE issue 45, June 1991: Olaf Olafsson and Sony Electronic Publishing; Columbia Pictures and Sony Music; CSG Imagesoft, Solstice and the new Sony Imagesoft name; Hook and Hudson Hawk with Ocean; “games on potato chips”; the rumoured ¥100,000 CD drive.
Edge issue 31, April 1996: Sony’s purchase of Psygnosis in June 1993.
Edge issue 41, January 1997, pp. 68–77: Net Yaroze, conceived by Kutaragi.
Edge issue 77, autumn 1999, p. 7: PlayStation 2 price and Japanese date. Edge issue 145, January 2005: the DS at ¥15,000 and the PSP at ¥19,800, a week apart in December 2004.
Edge issue 171, January 2007: the PlayStation 3’s Japanese launch on 11 November and US launch on 17 November 2006. Edge issue 172, February 2007: PS3 delays and shortages; Kazuo Hirai replacing Ken Kutaragi as president of Sony Computer Entertainment.
Edge issue 246, November 2012: PS Vita launched in Japan on 17 December 2011 and in most other territories in February 2012. Edge issue 256, August 2013: the PlayStation 4’s £349/$399 price against the Xbox One’s £429/$499.
“Studio Liverpool (1984-2012) - A Eulogy”, GodisaGeek.com, August 2012 (web, secondary): the closure of Studio Liverpool.
Sony Interactive Entertainment, company history page, accessed September 2026 (web, secondary): Sony Computer Entertainment established in 1993 as a joint venture of Sony Corporation and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan). https://sonyinteractive.com/en/our-company/company-history/
Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Business Data & Sales”, accessed September 2026 (web, secondary): cumulative shipments of PlayStation (more than 102.4 million), PlayStation 2 (more than 160 million), PSP (more than 76.4 million), PlayStation 3 (more than 87.4 million) and PlayStation 4 (more than 117 million). https://sonyinteractive.com/en/corporate/data.html
Wikipedia, “Sony” and “Sony Interactive Entertainment” (web, secondary): the founding of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo in 1946 and the Sony name from 1958; SCE’s establishment on 16 November 1993; the 2016 merger and move to San Mateo; the PlayStation 4’s North American launch on 15 November 2013 and the PlayStation 5’s launch on 12 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Interactive_Entertainment