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The Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins has denied giving Sony the idea for the PlayStation, following a claim from the former EA executive Bing Gordon in the recent Amazon Prime documentary series It's In The Game: Madden NFL.

The new docuseries was released on Amazon Prime late last month and spans four episodes covering the making of Electronic Arts' Madden series of American football games, with episode two, in particular, touching upon the departure of Hawkins from the company to create the 3DO and the arrival of the PlayStation on the market.

It is during this episode that Gordon went on to claim that Hawkins had been responsible for influencing Sony's decision to enter the video game space, stating the following while talking to the documentary's film crew:

“Trip left EA and he went to Japan and he pitched Sony on, ‘I’m going to make this new player’. But Sony went away from that meeting and said, ‘Maybe we should enter this market ourselves.’ And so Trip inadvertently caused the PlayStation to come to market."

Hawkins himself was interviewed for the documentary but had told the crew a the time, "I don't think we need to go there", when asked whether he wanted to talk about the 3DO.

However, since then, he has broken his silence on the subject over on Facebook, to debunk Gordon's claim and make sure that the Japanese engineer Ken Kutaragi gets all of the the credit he deserves for being the driving force behind the Sony machine.

On Facebook, he wrote:

"No BING-O: In the new Prime Video Madden doc, Bing Gordon says that when I met with Sony about 3DO, it gave them the idea to create the PlayStation. Sony's computer genius, Ken Kutaragi, designed the sound chip for Nintendo's 16-bit Super NES in the late 1980s and had always dreamed of designing a console. In 1988, Sony and Nintendo began working together on the SNES-CD, but Nintendo later canceled it, allowing Ken's dreams to come true. I didn’t speak to Sony about 3DO until later in 1991, when Ken shared they were already working on their own console—and it was too late to abandon that work for 3DO. #founder #ea #recordstraight #facts #3DO"

For many, Hawkins' version of events will likely be much closer to the version that they've already heard reported online, but it's great to see him go out of his way to correct the record and shoot down this potential misunderstanding of the events before it can spread any further.

[source facebook.com]