Former head of PlayStation WorldWide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has shared how Ken Kutaragi came up with the name ‘PlayStation’.
During an interview on the MinnMax YouTube channel, Shuhei Yoshida was asked about the origin of the name ‘PlayStation’. Yoshida recalled that the idea for the name came from Ken Kutaragi himself. The engineering technologist named it as such because people at work use computers and call them “workstations”. Similarly, PlayStation is a computer people can play on.
Yoshida further mentioned that, in the US, people didn’t like the name ‘PlayStation’. Instead, they usually referred to the it as the PSX. Eventually, they wanted to change the name, as people in the country thought ‘PlayStation’ sounded very childish. He said that when Sony began the gaming business, it was a small startup in Japan. Sony US and Sony Europe put together a small team each under Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (SCEJ). These teams were doing their own thing and not reporting directly to SCEJ. Yoshida mentioned that this was pretty frustrating for the executives in the Sony Computer Entertainment team.
During E3 1995, when the company was in the process of launching PlayStation in the U.S., Sony US tried to introduce a new character called ‘Polygon Man’. Yoshida recalled that he looked like a bunch of crude, flat-shaded polygons. The US division had prepared everything, including coasters, t-shirts, and other merchandise for the event. However, upon finding out, Kutaragi did not approve of the idea. He ordered the removal of every reference to Polygon Man. Even then, some of the goods were there when the team from SCEJ had reached the E3 show floor.
According to Yoshida, the reason behind Kutaragi not liking Polygon Man was because it only used flat-shaded polygons, and did a poor job of representing the console’s capabilities, as it could run far better-looking textures.
