John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and one of the video game pioneers responsible for the popularization of the first person shooter, has given his take on what he believes to be a mistake on Sony’s part in choosing the Cell processor as the heart of its next-gen game console. His remarks were made to Game Informer at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Carmack contrasted his experience with the PS3 to that of the Xbox 360. "We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it…but the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU [Cell processor] by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects [of the chip] that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers."
Much of the game industry believes that the race for next-gen game console superiority will be a close one. Carmack also believes this and commented, "I suspect [Sony is] not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly–they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint."
The viewpoints expressed by Carmack are subjective, but his belief that the race won’t be won in a landslide by Sony may have some merit, as Microsoft’s 360 and Nintendo’s Wii continue to rack up strong sales numbers. Regardless of which machine holds the lead at the moment, Sony still has ample time to prove to the world that its development decisions concerning the PS3 were sound and prudent. But playing catch-up has never been easy in the game console business and Sony must redouble its efforts to not only get enough machines on the market, but to ensure that there are superior game titles developed by Carmack and his colleagues for the PS3.
