The Walkman is dead. Long live the Sony PlayStation, writes Faisal Islam
Lara Croft’s newly released album on Sony Records is not available in the shops. Fans of the electronic games heroine turned virtual pop star will have to hook up their PlayStation to a Sony digital network and download directly to minidisc in seconds. For a slightly higher price, fans can choose a compilation of their own favourite mixes from the company’s website.
Welcome to Sony’s vision of home entertainment in the 21st century. It is a world where the fictional Croft, who today stars in the Tomb Raider video games, will find her role much diminished. In the next- generation PlayStation, players will be able to digitally transpose video images of their own face on to hers, making themselves the stars of Tomb Raider, or any other interactive film they choose.
Sony is moving away from low-value manufacture of televisions and video recorders into the high-value, weightless industries of the next century – a vision underpinned by interactivity, connectivity and “personal digital networks” of computers.
Ultimately, it is about merging discrete 20th-century forms of entertainment – music, film, computers and games – into new, as yet undefinable forms, and delivering them over digital networks.
There have been two significant announcements from Sony giving a glimpse of this vision. Recently the company took the wraps off the successor to its phenomenally successful PlayStation games console.
The next PlayStation will spearhead Sony’s efforts as it stakes its claims to the future of digital media.
This is a fair turnaround from the original PlayStation launch five years ago. Some Sony executives were so concerned then about the effect of the games system on their mighty brand that permission for the joint use in marketing of the words Sony and PlayStation was withdrawn.
Four years on, PlayStation contributed 42% of Sony’s operating profits, double the combined contribution of its music and film divisions.
The console is now as emblematic of corporate success as the Walkman was in the 1980s. Ironically, it was the strength of its own brand and superior marketing that carved out PlayStation’s 55% market share in the face of technologically superior competition.
Placing machines in nightclub chill-out rooms and sponsoring Champion League football, Formula 1 motor racing and snowboarding made the PlayStation into fashionable entertainment. By the end of last year, 50-million had been sold: interactive leisure had become a mass market.
Sony unveiled the first “test-drives” of the next-generation machine to leading software developers at the Tokyo International Forum. Company president Nobuyuki Idei claimed it “surpasses a mere games machine”.
Details of the technical specification brought gasps of amazement from an audience packed with the industry’s leaders.
“It is mind-blowing,” said Ian Livingstone, president of Eidos Interactive, developer of the Tomb Raider games. “Sony was between three and five years ahead of the then PC technology when it launched the PlayStation. This machine is at least as far ahead now.”
The superior graphics rival those used in film-making. The 128-bit processor is three times as powerful as the Pentium III chip in the most advanced PC, and strong enough to simulate intelligent behaviour. It will use digital video disc (DVD) technology.
The graphics allow characters in the games to respond to the way in which the user controls them. Over time, they learn about the player: if he or she is doing badly, the character may become agitated or annoyed. The best Tomb Raider players may be “rewarded” with flirtatious behaviour from Croft.
Sony has even trade-marked a name for the millions of processor calculations required to model behaviour in this way: Emotion Synthesis. This is the backbone of the company’s aim to create “a totally different form of entertainment based on computer”.
In other words, as the quality of the graphics and sound increases, the boffins are able to mimic every nuance of a player’s body language, so that using the machine becomes more like watching, or even taking a part in, a film.
Phil Harrison, a vice-president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, says the ultimate aim is games that “stimulate the same level of emotion as, for example, Saving Private Ryan. If a character dies, the experience would be so realistic you might become misty-eyed.”
Such aims are not exclusive to Sony, but it is uniquely placed to take advantage of the convergence between electronic games and films, given its expertise in film distribution. The Sony Corporation owns Columbia Studios.
There are other potential crossovers: a number of communications connections are planned to expand possibilities for the next-generation PlayStation.
Its main rival, the Sega Dreamcast, can connect you for Internet gaming now. The following generation of PlayStation could offer this, but Sony indicated that telephone networks were not advanced enough to make this worthwhile yet. The PlayStation developers were reluctant to say whether the machine would play DVD movies. Clearly, Sony faces a dilemma over providing this for the new machine. After all, who would buy a Sony DVD player if they could run the movies on their PlayStation?
The new games machine will, however, interface with video recorders, digital TVs and cameras, printers and keyboards. There will clearly be more scope to expand the role of a PlayStation from playing games to a whole range of interactive entertainment.
Perhaps Sony will stop making DVD players altogether, and instead concentrate on delivering movies through digital networks. Sony is already involved in the pioneering Madison trial in San Diego for the electronic delivery of music. Certainly, the strategic trend discernible from the restructuring involves a movement from analogue to digital technology, and from hardware to software.
In many respects the Sony of the future could become the perfect example of vertical integration motivated by technology: one company acting as manufacturer, distributor and retailer – cutting other firms out of the chain and taking all the profits.