Kutaragi on 'Xbox 1.5'

In an interview with Impress PC Watch, Sony's Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation consoles, says the company thinks of the PlayStation 3 as "not a game machine" but rather an entertainment computer. (Translated by GameSpot.) He explains:

"We haven't been creating our [past] PlayStations for the sake of games. Our belief, and the motivation behind running our company, has been to [explore ways of] applying the power of computers to entertainment and enjoyment. We equipped the original PlayStation with a 3D graphics chip, and we equipped the PS2 with the Emotion engine. The PS3 isn't designed to lean towards games. It's not a computer for children. In the sense that our goal has been [to create] a computer that's meant for entertainment, you could say that the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had existed as steps towards the PlayStation 3."

The story notes that Kutaragi "went on to say that Microsoft's new game console is more of an 'Xbox 1.5' than a new console, in the sense that it seems like an extension of the original Xbox." (Via Engadget.)

Gizmodo modifies the image of the next Xbox accordingly.

On a related note, Xbox Live's Major Nelson this week posted a series of items seeking to counter Sony's contention that the PS3 will be technologically superior to the Xbox 360: Part One, Two, Three, Four.