This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of both PlayStation and the Tekken series.. The two brands have a very close bond, which dates back to their origins. During the Tokyo Game Show 2024 there will be space for Celebrate the Father of PlayStation, Ken Kutaragiwho will give a speech at the event. To celebrate it in advance, he spoke Katsuhiro Haradathe director of the Tekken series, who recalled some interesting facts about Kutaragi, whom he considers a sort of father figure.
Harada wrote a long post on X about Kutaragi, painting him as an introspective person, with the always looking to the futurea very different image from the gruff businessman he has built up over the years.
Dad Kutaragi
One of Harada’s earliest memories concerns the barrels of sake that Kutaragi often brought to the Namco team to celebrate Tekken going gold. It seems the tradition has continued to this day, with the father of PlayStation bringing a barrel of Sake to Harada on a recent visit.
Harada also pointed out that Tekken was technically the first game to be released on PlayStation hardware, considering that the Namco System 11 arcade board architecture was based on the same.
But let’s read in full what Harada wrote about Kutaragi:
“Kutaragi-san is a father figure to me too.
Many publishers and game companies can share anecdotes and sagas about him, and many people are afraid of him. But For us at the old Namco, and especially for the Tekken project, he was like a good father…Every time we finished the master ROMs for Tekken, he would show up with a big barrel of sake and serve it to us.
He would talk to us about the PlayStation 2 project even when there were no rumors about it, and would give us prototypes of the hardware (we were shocked by the enormous size of the initial PS3 development kit, and even talked about whether it might not fit into a commercial console). One of the things I liked most about him was his philosophy: “Who are your rivals, Kutaragi-san?”, to which he would reply, “The future is always my rival.”
Today, cloud servers and other online infrastructures are commonplace, but Kutaragi-San told us, back when we were at the old Namco in the late 90s, that “everything will eventually merge into the network, even PlayStation.”
At the time, we didn’t really understand what he meant by “merging into the network,” so what was he referring to? But in the 1990s, he was already looking ahead to the current online age.
I had drinks with Kutaragi-san about two months ago, and when I discussed with him the enormous costs and long development times of today, he presented me with ideas and future projections that turned my thinking on its head.
I asked him, “But Kutaragi-san, when that time comes, won’t you have reached the end of your human life?” but he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “No, no, let’s not wait, let’s do it! You do it too! Most things that are at the level of human expectations can be done“, he said forcefully.
Oh, I understand that this is a man who is always excited to go beyond the future, instead of thinking about the time he has left. He is like a powerful non-evil Heihachi with a scientific background.”
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