PlayStation 2 [PS2] Original Tech Demo Presentation! (1999?)

March 2, 1999 - PlayStation 2 may be mind-boggling enough from a mathematics standpoint, but its white paper specifications can’t truly be put into perspective until you see what they can spit out in the real world. And that’s exactly what we saw at today’s unveiling of the hardware in Tokyo. Sony Computer Entertainment’s hardware wizard, Ken “Father of PlayStation“ Kutaragi introduced a number of technical demos produced by Square, Namco, and Sony itself, all running in real-time on prototype hardware. On an important note, Sony was quick to stress that most developers did not receive the kits necessary to create these demos until a week ago. Here’s a breakdown of what was shown: Ridge Racer Girl - Namco’s second demo was a real-time recreation of the head of its R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 mascot girl. The detail here was phenomenal, looking as good, if not better, than she did in the game’s introduction. Gran Turismo - In this rather straight-forward demonstration, Polyphony Digital has ported over the code from the original Gran Turismo, upping the texture resolution considerably, resulting in an almost photo-realistic racer. This was shown to illustrate the ease of moving PlayStation code onto PlayStation 2 with considerable enhancements. Emotion Demo - Square used the head of its “old man“ character from Final Fantasy: The Movie to illustrate the Emotion Engine’s incredible ability to manipulate facial features in real-time. The man looked exactly as he does in the film, right down to the wrinkles, as he frowned and smiled.