That dark monolith with degraded letters, a logo that was turned at will, and a good handful of slits that became the favorite resting place of a whole generation of specks of dust, has not taken long to proclaim itself as one of the most celebrated designs from the history of consoles.
Teiyu Goto came from designing the first PlayStation and, for the second generation of Sony consoles, he decided to take inspiration from “the emptiness of space“And the jump to a new dimension of”power without limits”To create the PS2 layout. Well, in that and in a design of Atari that Sony I buy.
The seed of PS2 design
We are in 1993, a year before the first PlayStation Animate the Japanese Christmas. On the other side of the pond, in sunny California, the mythical Atari is preparing for another launch that will mark a before and after in the video game industry: Atari Jaguar.
Normally, marking a before and after tends to be tied to unprecedented success or a 180º turn in the way we do things, but in this case what we found was the last nail on the coffin of a Atari that he had staked everything on one card, his success in the world of consoles.
Precisely from that bet this story germinates, with the cancellation of the range of computers Atari to focus the company’s support on the Jaguar. With this decision, the abandonment of the project that should be the next step for the company in the personal computer sector, the prototype Falcon 040, remains in limbo of products that do not reach production.
The PC industry says goodbye before meeting the first computer you can put horizontally or vertically. An innovative box able to stand upright thanks to its design and a pedestal designed to ensure its stability. An idea that, after being stored in a drawer, would be parked for the next seven years.
From Atari to Sony
After shaping not a few televisions of the brand and joining the project of PlayStation in which he would create the design of the console and its controls, including the iconography of the triangle, the square, the circle and the X -the symbology of a point of view, a piece of paper, and the yes and no decisions, respectively- , Teiyu Goto is challenged to design PS2.
On paper, a concept that the designer himself still maintains among his most outstanding achievements in his Web page: “broadcast into dark outer space from our intelligence-filled water planet”. The result? The classic black monolith with blue tints that we all know.
Comparisons, as you may have already seen from the images, give way to much more than a nice coincidence. Despite the aesthetic changes, the similarity between the Atari and PS2 it is more than evident.
And it is for justified reasons, at least at the legal level, as this patent shows. From that hecatomb that was the launch of Jaguar and the fall of Atari, Sony knew how to take a slice by acquiring that design while waiting to give it a second life. The world was left without its Falcon 040, but luck would have it that that idea came back to life with the design of PS2.