Charles Cecil of Revolution Software gives an eyewitness account of the new PlayStation announcement.

I arrived in Tokyo expecting not to hear much that wouldn’t be obvious. We assumed that the Next Generation PlayStation (NGP) would be a year ahead of the Dreamcast and so a year more advanced. In reality the hardware is a quantum leap ahead of what we could have expected. Even the cynics were blown away. The hardware even leapfrogs the next generation of PC technology.

It should be emphasised that this was a broad technical presentation so there are many things that are still not known. We do not know, for example, whether the DVD capabilities of the NGP will enable DVD movies to be played. We do not know whether a modem will be bundled. We do not know the price or release date.

We do know that the hardware will deliver 16 million polygons per second with full effects (over 100 million without). At a resolution of 640x480 and at a frame rate of 50 fps, this is more polygons than pixels!

This has enormous implications on how we approach graphics. Sony stressed the relationship that they were building with tools developers to write Middleware (as they call it) and it is clear that to do justice to this sort of hardware power, we are going to have to work with very advanced tools.

With all this processing power, we need to change the way that we approach writing games. Sony talked about a ‘new form of entertainment’. We no longer have the traditional constraints - the limit really is our creativity. Of course there will be the rush to produce even better racing and fighting games - this will be the bread and butter product on which the success of the NGP will rely.

But Sony were keen to stress the element of ‘emotion’. This should not be dismissed as a whimsical Japanese term. At Revolution we concentrate on writing plot-based games, and in doing so we strive to create emotion. This level of hardware power blows away our constraints. What we need to do now is determine how to utilise the hardware in a new and innovative way rather than simply making incremental changes. It is very exciting.

I was really pleased to hear that the Next Generation PlayStation would be backwardly compatible - although I was surprised that this was done through hardware rather than software emulation. The idea of enhanced resolution PlayStation games was attractive.

I am suspicious about the release date. Development kits are not available, but Sony claim that the NGP will be released in Japan this winter (presumably before April 2000). Sony have stated that they aim to sell 15 million units within 18 months of launch which is an enormously aggressive sales target. To achieve this they will have to price low and push hard.

All in all the launch was a huge success and there can be little doubt that the NGP will remain hot news for a long, long time.

NB: Future Gamer would like to thank Charles for writing this after an incredibly long flight back from Tokyo.