GTFO, Ken.

This is a couple of days old, but its pretty significant news for hardcore gamers. Ken Kutaragi has vacated his position as the face and voice of the Sony Playstation. This is a sad end to what should have been an amazing career. Kutaragi’s buzz in the early years of "electronic gaming" put him on the same scale of importance as Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. Just as Mario’s creator is credited with giving the videogame industry life and a future, the Playstation’s creator is credited with giving the industry a reneissance in a time it might have slowed down and died.

He won’t be remembered for that, though – and rightly so. His memory is forever pock marked by several bad decisions by Sony brass, for which he was the figurehead and the willing scape goat. By all means, the PS3 should be mopping up the competitors and leaving them out to dry, just as the PS2 whomped the Gamecube and X-Box, but that didn’t happen this console cycle. Some people blame the late release of the PS3 for its lack of performance, but I firmly believe Kutaragi is directly responsible for some terrible design decisions made to the console that allowed it to, perhaps not fail, but not reach its full potential.

After all the research that was thrown out the window at the last second, the high manufacturing costs, the unnecessary bluray player, and the iffy backwards compatibility, the PS3 retails for five hundred ninety nine dollars. Add in three extra wireless controllers, at sixty dollars a piece. Four games, sixty bucks each. And let’s add another hundred dollars for miscellaneous costs or peripherals, to make the console unique to the buyer.

That is eleven hundred and twenty dollars to play four games – none of which are worth buying the console over in the first place. Two controllers, and no peripherals, its still almost a thousand dollars. Asking that of a consumer is insane, but Sony assumed they had the fan base to pull ahead.

They don’t. They were arrogant. They were sloppy. And now the Wii is kicking their ass. Ken Kutaragi let it happen, and he does not deserve his job any more.

So long, Ken. Thank you for all you did to contribute to the industry in the past. Hope that you did not contribute heavily to the slow downfall of the Playstation brand with the PS3. And the PSP. I’ll never forgive not having a second analog stick.

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