Gamertell

Ken Kutaragi, creator of the SNES sound chip and the entire Playstation line of game systems, stands poised to be the latest recipient of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ (AIAS) Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be delivered at next year’s upcoming Design Innovate Communicate Entertain summit being held February 2008 in Las Vegas.

The press release for the award is appropriately glowing, with the following quote from AIAS president Joseph Olin.

Ken Kutaragi’s passion, innovative thinking and business savvy sparked a monumental movement that was unstoppable.  If it wasn’t for Ken and his concept of the original Playstation, there wouldn’t be the billion dollar industry there is today.  His contributions have clearly set new standards for developers, publishers and consumers worldwide.

To be fair, the reasoning is probably at least half-right.  The game and some of the innovations of the first two iterations of the Playstation were nothing short of revolutionary.  The PS1 made the concept of portable memory cards introduced by the Neo Geo a mainstream feature for a good number of years and fostered things, like making game cases the same size as traditional CD and DVD cases, that made gaming seem more in tune with bigger entertainment industries such as music or movies, if only superficially.

However, you could almost argue that he opened Pandora’s Box. The original Playstation was the first major entry a decade’s worth of shoddily-designed hardware, as anybody who has spent the worth of the console’s original street price on either repairs or replacements will tell you. With “Red Ring of Death” being a term of infamy among XBox 360 owners, the plague has spread beyond Sony’s walls now.

That’s to say nothing of Kutaragi’s efforts in recent years, which include a portable with a minimum of non-gimped, non-port, original software that, if the media at the time was any indication, made you look like a big, tough adult, and a console which costs about one month of the groom’s salary but has shown little to actually justify said price other than two upcoming single killer-app titles (assuming they stay exclusive, which is always subject to rumors).

But this is probably more about Kutaragi’s achievements prior to then, rather than his failures afterwards.

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