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In the 1980s,Mr. Hirai, who just graduated from the International Christian University of Japan, took a master's degree in literature. In the same year, he joined a company jointly founded by Sony and CBS, later Sony Music of Japan。 It was a time when yadali and Nintendo took turns to dominate. When yadali transplanted space invaders, it was already famous. Nintendo set up a subsidiary in New York and established its family computer status with FC game machines.

In those days, Sony didn't have a game console.

After the fiasco between Betamax and VHS video recording, Sony began to focus on high-end hardware and content integration under the leadership of Morita Zhaofu. It first acquired CBS's film and music department, and established Sony film entertainment. At the same time, the CD-ROM CD-ROM drive, which Sony participated in the standard formulation, began to be implemented to CD desktops and walkmans, and constantly enjoyed the sweetness.

Just in the late 1980s, Nintendo FC follow-up model SFC, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America, was ready to launch. Sony, in contact with Nintendo, was eager to make a lot of money from the CD-ROM.

We all know the ending. Nintendo announced in May 1992 that it would give up Sony's CD-ROM, return to FC's traditional card design, add more than 6MB of ROM to the card, and use S-RAM to save game records. Yes, for Nintendo, being able to keep records in the game is more important than having a larger read-only memory for the game.

Later, the top decision-maker at that time, Dianxiong ohe, endorsed the next era game machine plan of Ryuki Kudo, upgrading Sony Music of Japan to Sony electronic entertainment sec, hoping to fight Nintendo mainframe with CD-ROM standard.In 1994, Sony launched its first home video game entertainment platform. It took Sony only two years from being abandoned by the Nintendo SFC to the birth of PlayStation.

In this period, Mr. Hirai became an employee of Sony electronic entertainment in Japan. With his excellent English ability, he was sent to the United States to join Sony electronic entertainment in the United States two years later, opening up his own pace of promotion, and later the legend of Playstation, and countless smiles that Sony fans need to guard.

Here we are not talking about the history of PlayStation. In the process of 25 years of upgrading and fighting against monsters, PlayStation defeated Sega, pushed the rising star Xbox, and now the way to go to heaven with Nintendo are all from the original rebellious and unyielding innovation spirit of PlayStation. andThis article will explore different 25 years of Playstation anecdotes.

When Nintendo N64, the successor of Super Nintendo SFC, was still using the card tape, square, the game developer at that time, decided to switch from the Nintendo series host to the Playstation platform. The reason is very simple. Even though "Final Fantasy 6" has exhausted the last function of SFC, in the face of the coming trend of 3D game screen, it is the best choice to choose the Playstation with the strongest performance host at that time and supporting the huge capacity of CD-ROM. Because of this, we saw the unprecedented changes brought by final fantasy 7 on Playstation, which is also the unprecedented and earth shaking changes in the industry.

The most powerful part of Final Fantasy 7 is the perfect integration of CG and the game by using the 3D game interface. The most famous one is from Alice praying at the beginning to watching the divine from the camera and finally pushing the perspective behind Claude. The game starts.

At that time, the Western game industry was still trying to use real people's cutaway performance of the transition animation. The final fantasy 7 on the Playstation platform was undoubtedly completely subversive. In addition, the film narrative style that the final fantasy series has always been good at, the magnificent world view quickly replaced the status of jrpg game in the hearts of the brave fighting the dragon.

Then Square did nothing in final Fantasy 8, completely abandoned the previous three-headed task style, created a new picture with the proportion of completely real characters, and also made use of the huge media capacity of CD-ROM to extend the length of CG from 20 minutes of final Fantasy 7 to 1 hour of final Fantasy 8. meanwhile

Square also introduced the concept of theme song to the game from "Final Fantasy 8". The "eyes on me" sung by Faye Wong is closely related to the process of the game. For the first time in history, a single has created a sales volume of 400000 pieces in Japan. It is also from "Final Fantasy 8" that the boundaries between games, entertainment and movies begin to blur.

And "Final Fantasy 9" returns to the three body ratio, and calls for the failure of not winning, which once again lays the foundation for "Final Fantasy" series to start modeling with the proportion of real people, focusing on the game rhythm of picture quality and film narrative.

The final fantasy series reached its peak in RPG Games of the same period. On the one hand, it is a story structure like a movie. On the other hand, it is a picture height that other platforms cannot reach under the support of PlayStation. As a result, the seventh to ninth works only appear on PlayStation.

During the R & D period of the 10th final fantasy 10, Sakamoto, the father of final fantasy, failed to promote the CG film Final Fantasy: deep in the soul, which made square close to bankruptcy. At that time, Sony saved the production team of Final Fantasy by purchasing 18% shares of square. In addition, the platform market and performance of the same period were weak, and the final fantasy series was sorted out Zhang became the exclusive work of Playstation platform.

PlayStation: The PlayStation is tough enough to crash the 3D picture, and it's also changing the track of another game's playmaker's mischievous dog. Before meeting the PlayStation, they've done a little crazy skiing for Apple II, and did the

Later, the famous "old confused wolf" series on Playstation was born. How to change from 2D action mode to 3D action game was a difficult problem in the industry at that time. The 3D game field created by Playstation was like an uncultivated wasteland. Developers need to consider how to make the game smooth rolling screen from scratch, how to play from the perspective of the third person, and how to arrange puzzles and traps in 3D screen. CD-ROM brought unimaginable storage space at that time, but also brought great challenges to new game settings.

But with the continuous arrival of PlayStation 2, the storage media has been upgraded to DVD, and the processing performance is more powerful, which makes the naughty dog puzzled about the old perplexed wolf. In the Playstation era, the old perplexed wolf can only make a linear breakthrough in the plot, but the performance of PlayStation 2 is enough to add more freedom and open space to the game. The original basic story statement of Playstation can be replaced by a complete transition animation on PlayStation 2.

For this reason, similar to square, naughty dogs began to try to introduce more film narratives in the later game development. The most successful example is "mysterious sea area: Drake's wealth" on Playstation 3, and derived the famous "mysterious sea area" series. Four years later, ign's "the last of us" came out, and the game has become a large interactive movie.

Up to now, naughty dog has also got Sony's long-term meal ticket, and can focus on the development of Playstation platform games. In particular, the next Playstation 5 will have controller tactile feedback, ray tracing and 8K graphics performance, as well as all solid-state drive design, which is undoubtedly a new challenge for naughty dogs.

By the way, Jason, one of the founders of the naughty dog.

Redefining modern handle

In addition to the changes to the game screen, PlayStation is particularly important to promote the game controller. Now we can see the left and right double rocker, which provides palm handle, independent direction key d-pad, as well as the design of trigger key and thumb button, originally from PlayStation. In other words, Sony never invented controllers, but they used Playstation to advance the development of modern controllers and promote the ergonomic design still in use today.

The development of Playstation controller can be divided into two parts. The first generation of Playstation controllers introduced in 1994 first created slender palmrest, trigger button and d-pad, and then the double rocker design in 1997 also made 3D personas on the Playstation platform easier to control. The left rocker is responsible for looking around the environment, and the right rocker is used to control character actions.

Before the birth of Playstation controller, the shape and size of game controller can be described as various. For example, the rectangular handle on nes and the triple button on Sega Genesis need to be familiar with the handle control and feel again every time they start, until the birth of Playstation controller solves this problem. Even if Nintendo tried the long and straight controller on the Wii later, it modified the configuration of the game controller to be equipped with the long and thin palmrest again in the switch, whether it was the joy con grip that was brought by random or the switch Pro Professional handle that was sold separately.

Another leap forward for the Playstation controller was the introduction of the dual rocker controller in 1997. Because the d-pad is no longer suitable for 3D interface conversion, a set of double rocker dualshock control technology is finally adopted, that is, the rocker is no longer fixed up and down the left and right switch, but can seamlessly convert the viewing angle 360 degrees.

Only today, dualshock has become the mainstream, including the huge amount of research and development of Xbox one, Google stadia and other controllers, can see the shadow of Sony dualshock. According to Sony's official data, the dualshock 4 on Playstation 4 has become the best selling handle ever.

Sony has also tried to add more new features to dualshock, such as six axis motion sensing on Playstation 3 and touchpad on Playstation 4, but the enthusiasm of the new game is not as crazy as the dualshock double rocker.

Born in the pocket, and destroyed by the pocket, the ambitious host platform will inevitably lead to the mobile platform. As early as 2003, Sony released the Playstation portable, or PSP, in E3. Although PSP will be shipped in the second year, many details still need to be determined, but Sony has described PSP as a product that can replace Walkman status in the 21st century. 480 x 272 wide screen LCD is equipped with 1.8-inch UMD optical disk storage media, which is like a product one generation apart compared with GBA in that year.

So when the PSP went on sale in 2004, the winning balance was tilted directly to Sony. With its high-resolution screen and powerful multimedia performance, any opponent looked like a toy, which was also a point of pride for the cable bandits.

In Hirai's words, although the PSP takes the game as the core, it is not strictly a game machine. It is an entertainment device. With Sony's huge content output, it can even promote the sales of UMD movies and become a mobile movie viewing device. At the same time, it will promote the development of Sony's Memory Stick PRO Duo Memory stick.

There are enough black technologies to make PSP sales more than 80 million sets, which is far more than the number of 3DS, but that doesn't mean that the mobile platform of Playstation can flourish. Because the next PS Vita as a successor between the model into Waterloo.

Reasonably speaking, the physical hardware of PSV is very good, it solves many defects in PSP, such as equipped with a second rocker, upgraded a special game memory card, so that reading speed is faster, and effectively avoid piracy. The screen has also been updated to 5 inches 960

But the advanced hardware design didn't get better software support. The first batch of games supporting PSV all originated from Sony's own content output, and then few third-party game developers followed up. Most of the features that PSV advocates are also being eroded by smartphones. Especially the exclusive content side, as well as the special interface, is not very friendly to the broad entertainment platform.

Even so, we still can't forget that PSP has brought us many classics, including monster hunter, goddess strange news 3, acid alloy equipment, rock rock and so on. Many years ago, the beautiful memories on our palms are still in deep roots and continue to sprout in various platforms or film and television works.

With a heart of supercomputing

Sony developed a Linux suite for PlayStation 2 in 2002, allowing developers to build their own systems.

Soon, some researchers found that a series of operations based on image processing unit can be realized by connecting multiple PlayStation 2 hosts in series and writing their own code. In fact, image processing cluster is not exclusive to PlayStation. In that era when professional workstations are still scarce, any graphics processing unit supporting Linux is likely to be refitted by the R & D personnel to the rendering machine they need.

For example, NCSA, the national supercomputer application center of the United States, purchased about 70 PlayStation 2. Through coding and establishing database connection, 70 graphic processing units finally achieved the effect of collaborative operation. However, at that time, the program was not running well, and any error could cause the whole system to restart. For about 70 PlayStation 2, restarting was like a nightmare. Soon, the project was closed, and NCSA began to try to solve the problem in other ways.

The legend of Playstation 3 simulating the earth began in the cold room of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Similarly, researchers have been looking for a powerful graphics processing unit to solve the problem of astrophysical computing. The researchers combined a large number of Playstation 3 through the network cable. The cell processor inside Playstation 3 was made by IBM, which in theory was the same as the most advanced supercomputer at that time.

It's just that astrophysics computing itself is not easy to attract too much sponsorship, so researchers began to try to buy a relatively cheap Playstation 3, and write their own generation to buy a set of cheap supercomputers.

At the same time, R & D personnel from New York Air Force Research Laboratory began to use more than 1700 Playstation 3 to build a larger computing cluster. At the peak, the cluster even became the 35th fastest supercomputer of the year. But the emergence of demand also means that the supply chain begins to be complete. Soon, professional computer manufacturers will provide them with a computing cluster system with lower power consumption and higher efficiency. The special equipment is the accelerated operation based on GPU CUDA core later, which has been able to easily exceed the operation efficiency of Playstation 3 by more than 50 times.

Interestingly, in the subsequent upgrade of Playstation 3 slim, Sony also quietly deleted the Linux suite. On the one hand, slim performance is weak, on the other hand, Linux suite can help hackers better crack Playstation 3, which is what Sony does not want to see.

Become a street culture no matter what products, with more nature to form their own culture. The same is true of PlayStation. Nowadays, the Playstation logo has surpassed the game and become a part of cultural hype and designer integration. Behind the fixed collocation of P and s capital letters, it symbolizes the culture of a generation and its own personality.

Even if one day the Playstation brand no longer exists, people will take pains to use this PS logo. Just like now, people will stick the logo of yadali on their chest and tell you that they have witnessed the wave of arcade games in the last century. In other words, the Playstation logo itself will become a touchstone for different cultures.

Of course, it's not always the case that Playstation becomes a fashion brand. Just like the collaboration between the final fantasy series and Louis Vuitton, it takes fashion designers and artists several years to integrate the two brands. Similarly, Sony is also constantly striving to add its own culture to the products around it, such as sweater and T-shirt.

Although Playstation has been changing in recent years, the most acceptable Playstation log is the most original red, yellow, green and blue color version in the early stage, and even needs Japanese as a match. Such treatment, like Adidas's iconic crown and Nike's checkmark, originated in the last century, is not old, but still persuasive enough.

At the end of the article: ifixit disassembled the original Playstation after 25 years of integrity. From today's perspective, the internal structure of Playstation has almost no surprises. The rough and unprotected CD-ROM drive is surrounded by a rectifier circuit with huge capacitance. The digital circuit board under the body contains the image processing unit, output unit, memory, sound controller, etc. of PlayStation.

Today, the processing power of a non pro version of ordinary Playstation 4 is 50 times that of the original generation, and the memory is 4000 times that of the original generation. Of course, it can be seen that the calculation performance of the original generation of Playstation does not need the built-in fan for cooling. At present, the common glue bonding means do not appear in PlayStation.

Looking at the Playstation filled with standard screw fixing ports 25 years ago, and looking back at Playstation 4, is there an illusion of going through the whole century? Soon, PlayStation 5 will be made public in the 26th year of PlayStation. It's unimaginable to put light catching, solid-state drive and more sci-fi designs in the past.

The only constant is the uncompromising platform monopoly and black technology like innovation spirit of Playstation platform.