Ken Kutaragi

Ken Kutaragi (久夛良木 健 Kutaragi Ken , born August 8, 1950) is currently the President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, the videogames division of the Sony Corporation.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Kutaragi graduated from the city's University of Electro-Communications in 1975 with an electrical engineering degree, and immediately began working for Sony in their digital research labs. Here he gained a reputation as an excellent problem solver, and a forward thinking engineer. He worked on many successful projects including early liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and digital cameras.

In the late 1980s, after becoming interested in Nintendo's Famicom system, he persuaded Sony to fund his research into what eventually became the PlayStation. The success of that project led to him leading the development of its successor, the PlayStation 2, and he is currently working on the third in the series, the PlayStation 3. He is nicknamed "the father of the PlayStation".

Many of Sony's executives expected that the PlayStation would fail. In fact, the commercial success of the PlayStation franchise makes Sony Computer Entertainment the most profitable business division of Sony.

In 2005, Kutaragi became a casualty of Sony Corporation's leadership revamp. Not only did he lose the leadership of his company's consumer electronics division (which lost $288 million in 2004 under him), he was removed from the board of executives and for the 2nd time he was not promoted as Sony's corporate president.

While some people argued that Kutaragi's downfall was too harsh, others say he was a victim of a major setup made by then CEO Nobuyuki Idei, with whom he had an unfriendly working relationship. Idei promoted Kutaragi as the consumer electronic head of Sony in 2003. Other people believed that Kutaragi deserved to be pulled down in the ranks due to the massive losses Sony made in the consumer electronics market (under his leadership) as well as the failed product PSX (a modified PlayStation2 equipped with a DVD recorder and a hard disk drive) and the lackluster Japanese launch of the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

In May 2005, Kutaragi unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, the PlayStation 3 console which he described as a super computer-level entertainment device. Immediately after the E3, Kutaragi went on a barrage of media attacks against rivals Microsoft and Nintendo. He even branded the competing Xbox 360 console as "just an Xbox 1.5", while Microsoft's J Allard accused Sony of using pre-rendering in the footages of the PS3.

The most controversial trailer, the one that was most believed to be pre-rendered, was indeed found pre-rendered by a gaming publication. According to the magazine, the game ("Killzone") was actually running at only five frames per second (considered to be unplayable by any means) and was later on sped up to sixty frames per second for its public debut. Considering this, J Allard was right, since speeding up the game to non-real time framerates is considered pre-rendering.