PS2 euro boss: "The Japs were not too worried, but I knew MS had 5x more money than Sony. They could do anything they wanted

[/xbox]

..but they didn't turn out to be as prolific and experienced as we thought
"[To prepare against xbox] We courted third-parties like crazy, I was on that team and I know how much effort we put into getting people on board, getting the right kind of games and giving them the right incentives."
"Ken Kutaragi was very pro third-party. He said we should never allow ourselves to have more than a third of the software market or we'd drive away other investments, and I believed that."
Getting those exclusives began at E3 2000. "A few weeks prior, we sat down and targeted the games we thought would be good for exclusivity. We had a list of about seven and a pot of money."
"We went off to LA and we were holed up in the Sunset Marquis hotel, where we invited the publishers in one by one and just worked through the list."
During these meetings, Deering and Reeves would offer incentives in exchange for exclusivity. These included a reduction in the platform fee, marketing support and new-generation dev kits.
"The last meeting of the day was with Take-Two, We picked up something called State of Emergency, which I don't think would have been on Xbox anyway. Then I said, 'What else have you got?'
"And they said, 'Well, we've got this gta game... I suppose we could do a deal on that.'"
"Our technical people had said GTA III was not bad. It was innovative, but not a monster. I had just heard it was good. So I said, 'OK. It was remarkably cheap."
"I think one of the defining features of the ps2, although we didn't really know it at the time, was the inclusion of USB ports, That proved to be a pivotal hardware choice. It allowed all kinds of alternative controllers to happen, from microphones to guitars to EyeToy."
"One of Phil's really great contributions was being passionate about EyeToy," says Deering. "It didn't have the full backing of the management over in the States. They thought it was too wussy, they were still SEGA-minded and anything that wasn't hardcore was possibly too effeminate for their image"
Harrison recalls attending a silicon chip conference in San Francisco where Sony's engineers presented the Emotion Engine in the form of an academic paper. "I was fascinated by the reaction because the hardcore silicon chip experts fell into two camps," he says.
"One was, 'I don't believe it. It's all made up.' The other camp was, 'I do believe it, but there's no way we're ever going to be able to manufacture it because it's too complicated.'
"Ken proved everybody wrong. You could build it, and you could build it in volume. That was the moment Sony went from being just a games company to becoming a major global player in silicon chip design."

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