As Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kutaragi is regarded by most as the father of the PlayStation. It hasn't always been plain sailing, though. As a young engineer at Sony, Kutaragi spent his time writing assemblers, debuggers, compilers and the like from the depths of Sony's engineering labs. These programs were used to control tape decks and video players (remember that Sony are relatively new to videogames - the PlayStation was their first attempt, way back in 1994!).

He was obviously pretty good at his job and was promptly promoted to the position of project leader on Sony's analogue Mavica camera. The Mavica used a two-inch floppy disk for storage, which rotated at a then-unheard-of 3,600 rotations per minute. It was hoped that the 'microfloppy' would find its way into the world's PCs, a hope dashed by the dominance of the 3.5-inch diskette.

Kutaragi finally found his true calling when he bought Nintendo's 8bit NES (Famicom). He was mightily impressed with the console, though frustrated by the poor sound quality, and he approached Nintendo to propose a Sony solution for their 16bit system (SNES). Nintendo agreed and so Kutaragi and his team developed the audio chip for the SNES. The Nintendo project gave birth to a small team of designers, including Kutaragi and Masakazu Suzuoki, who went on to become the core of the PlayStation team.

In 1990, Kutaragi and his team collaborated with Nintendo on the first CD-ROM-based console. However, in 1991 Nintendo announced that they wanted to scrap the project in order to work with Phillips. Bad move, Nintendo. Kutaragi didn't bear a grudge; he just convinced his bosses at Sony that they could create a brand new gaming system that would beat Nintendo. They agreed, and three years later his efforts bore the sweetest fruit.

Ken Kutaragi is currently beavering away on PlayStation 2. It will probably be quite good.