The Making of: Playstation

Here is an article from edge-online.com. It gives a good introduction into the history of the playstation and its success.

Rising from the ashes of a battleground of negotiations and betrayal with Nintendo over the Super SNES CD, a peripheral CD-drive for use with the SNES "Nintendo declared that it would be breaking its deal with Sony by partnering with Philips instead." (edge staff, the making of: playstation, 2009) This enraged Sony's president Norio Ohga and with the influence of Ken Kutaragi (who designed the S-SMP chip, used in the Super NES) sony eventually decided to develop their own console. At that time named the Playstation X. 

A part of this article I found particularly interesting was the decision by Norio Ohga to remove Ken Kutaragi from Sony and move him along with nine team members to Sony Music. He did this for two reasons:

Not only outside the company but also internally views towards Sony entering the gaming business was met with resistance, and Ohga feared Kutaragi's passion to enter it would crush his reputation. Explained by a quote from Phil Harrison, the then president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios "The main reason why the Sony brand wasn't really used in the early marketing of the playstation was not necessarily out of choice, but it was because Sony's old guard was scared that it was going to destroy this wonderful, venerable, 50-yearold brand. They saw Nintendo and Sega as toys, so why on Earth would they join the toy business? That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years."(Harrison, n.d) This is also an interesting insight in to the cultural value of gaming within business at that time.

Secondly "Sony Music knew how to nurture creative talent and how to manufacture, market and distribute music discs - with the move to CD-ROM, the mechanics of making and supplying games had become similar to that used for music" (edge staff, the making of: playstation, 2009) which would have made the working on CD-ROM on the Playstation for Kutaragi an easy transition.