1up PS3 interview

[Lazybones]

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3158106

Man is it just me or are some of the answers given here just frightening!

[Thorin]

Uhh...  That interview is from January.  And that interview is the source of the now-infamous Jack Tretton quote:

JT: If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that's been on shelves for more than five minutes, I'll give you 1,200 bucks for it. I can get any retail buyer on the phone with you and get them to verify that there's not a single retail location in America where there's a PlayStation 3 on the shelf for sale. They've all been sold in a matter of minutes.

handled oh so gracefully by Penny Arcade on February 10th: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/02/10

[Thorin]

I laughed, too, that he was happy that the PS2 was outselling the Xbox360, not mentioning that the PS3 was seriously lagging behind!

Here's another little tidbit I found interesting:

EGM: You boast about having a high-end machine, with 1080p high-definition output, and yet you don't include the video cables to take advantage of that. You include very low-end cables, in fact. What gives?

JT: Different TVs have different requirements, and there's a fairly high cost of goods to putting a component in the box that may or may not be used. We're providing the best value we can for consumers. The cables that we put in the box will get the PS3 up and running, but if you want to optimize it, you will need additional cables--it depends on what kind of setup you have.

I have a 1080i TV, so an HDMI cable is of no value to me--I need component cables. Somebody else may have a 1080p TV and may want an HDMI cable. From what I understand of HDMI cables, there's a tremendous range of quality. So we could be having this discussion: "Well, you put an HDMI cable in there, but it wasn't the highest quality, and people have had to go out and buy longer HDMI cables or more expensive HDMI cables to optimize it." Or we could put a component cable in there, an HDMI cable in there, we could have an expandable retractor, and we could have it be of the highest quality, and then somebody would say, "You didn't put the HDTV in there. You realize this has to be hooked up to a TV to work...?" Now obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think the honest answer is, because there are so many different variations in what people are going to want and what people are going to need, we leave it up to them to choose that separately.

EGM: But that still doesn't make sense. It's a high-end piece of technology that you should at least have ready for the lowest-end HDTV. Especially with Blu-ray and 1080p being two of your main selling points.

JT: The statistics I've read say that 38 percent of the TVs that were sold this year were high-def TVs. To me that says 62 percent were not high-def. And the thing that I really want to make crystal clear, and maybe this cable is a point to bring that up: I think the PlayStation 3 is the best gaming experience you can buy whether you hook it up to a 1080p TV or whether you hook it up to a 19-inch black and white TV. We want to sell PlayStation 3s to everybody, not just people who have 1080p TVs and require HDMI connections.

I'm surprised that he reads any statistics at all, and I'm also wondering what he classifies as "high-def".  It's becoming near-impossible to find a 240p standard definition TV these days.  Even the cheap ones are at least 480i or 480p now.

[Lazybones]

Opps didn't notice it was a re print. I had never seen the FULL interview just part of the text before.

[Thorin]

It's still scary to read.  He really doesn't see that the PS3 might turn out to be a big flop.  I wonder, has the eBay price for a Wii gone higher than the eBay price for a PS3 yet?

[Mr. Analog]

Unless there are multiple "gotta have it" titles for the PS3 I think I'll miss it.