Ken Kutaragi

is a Japanese engineering technologist and businessman. He is the former chairman and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), the video game division of Sony Corporation, and current president and CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment. He is known as "The Father of the PlayStation", as he oversaw the development of the original console and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 3. He departed Sony in 2007, a year after the PlayStation 3 was released. He had also designed the sound processor for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. With Sony, he designed the VLSI chip which works in conjunction with the PS1's RISC CPU to handle the graphics rendering. Early years Kutaragi was born in Tokyo, Japan. His parents, although not wealthy by Japanese standards, still managed to own their own business, a small printing plant in the city. As Kutaragi grew into childhood, they actively encouraged the young boy to explore his mechanical abilities in the plant, and he worked after school there. Aside from his duties in his parents' factory, Kutaragi was a studious, high-level student; he was often described as a "straight-A student." Kutaragi always had the desire to "tinker", often taking apart toys as a child rather than playing with them. This curiosity carried from childhood, leading him as a teenager to learn the intricacies of electronics. Eventually, in fact, his love of electronics led to him enrolling in University of Electro-Communications, where he acquired an Electronics degree in the 1970s.