FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Samantha Sackin -- 213.629.4974
Fleishman-Hillard

E3, LOS ANGELES, May 10, 1995 -- The $5.2 billion video game industry changes forever today as Sony makes its formal debut with detailed announcements about plans for the PlayStation, a new CD-based game system already saluted by enthusiast magazine s as the next generation video game system for the North American marketplace. The PlayStation is being introduced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a video game industry trade show held here through May 13.

Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) will market and distribute the advanced system this fall, delivering the power of more than 500 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) before now only available on $50,000 workstations, resulting in games with three dimensional realism, CD quality sound and motion picture quality special effects that in some cases exceed the graphic quality of arcade versions.

"Our entry into the video game industry is a 'good news/bad news' situation," said Steve Race, president of SCEA. "It's good news for anyone interested in video games

that, for the first time, make the suspension of disbelief automatic - it will be a graphically realistic dinosaur who attacks you - not a brown blob with feet. For the people selling those other systems, PlayStation creates a bad news situation - peri od."

In an industry so competitive it could inspire its own video game, SCEA enters with advantages that make this company the contender to beat. With annual worldwide sales of over $40 billion, Sony is an international corporate, research and development he avyweight with the marketing muscle and savvy to enter and establish itself quickly in the field. And as part of the nation¹s largest total entertainment companies, SCEA will be able to count on the cooperation of its sister companies to impact the industry the very first day that the PlayStation becomes available.

For example, beginning day one, the PlayStation¹s CD-based games will be pressed by the same domestic state-of-the-art plants that churn out millions of audio CDs for Sony¹s music companies, Epic and Columbia.

"The PlayStation represents the single largest launch for Sony as a corporation since the launch of the audio CD," said Olaf Olafsson, president of Sony Electronic Publishing Company, SCEA's parent company. ³The dedication to developing a superior product, aligning with the best game developers and publishers, and our proven marketing abilities as a corporation are a positive sign for what can be expected.²
If the PlayStation's reception in the U.S. is anything similar to what was experienced in Japan -- another video game-hungry country -- the system can only be judged an unqualified hit in its rookie year.

Following its early December 1994 debut, more than 300,000 PlayStation units were sold through to consumers during the first month, helping to make the PlayStation the number one-selling next generation system in Japan. After just five months on the mar ket, Sony Computer Entertainment of Japan will achieve its preliminary target of 1 million units by the end of May.

Helping propel the system to prominence in Japan is the selection of outstanding software which, on average, is selling at an impressive four-to-one ratio to the hardware system. Hit titles in Japan include the chart toppers, Ridge Racer®, and Tekke n from Namco; Toh Shin Den by Takara; Parodius by Konami; Kileak the Blood from Sony Music Entertainment (Japan); and Sony Computer Entertainment¹s own title, Jumping Flash.

Stateside, the company's substantial marketing efforts will reflect a diversified approach targeting the retail trade and consumers, including national broadcast and print advertising campaigns, trial-based promotions, public relations, and the use of em erging mediums such as the Internet.

"Sony's proven track record in marketing consumer electronics and entertainment, our domestic infrastructure, combined with the proven power behind the PlayStation, gives us tremendous mileage with game developers, retailers, analysts and other deci sion-makers in this business," said Race. ³Overwhelming support from the retail community

in addition to more than 160 third-party software developers and publishers, such as Acclaim, Electronic Arts, Namco Hometek, Crystal Dynamics and Virgin Interactive, insure an ongoing stream of great games in a wide variety of genres.²

The PlayStation delivers radically enhanced gameplay via custom chip technology developed exclusively for Sony Computer Entertainment, and high speed parallel processing resulting in massive incremental power over video game systems with single processor s. Working in tandem, the PlayStation¹s multiple main processors deliver such special effects as 3-D polygon graphics; shading, fogging, digital lighting and

texture-mapping; rotating and scaling; multiple camera angles; 24-channel CD quality sound "stream through video" and 16 million colors that create the most realistic, most in-depth games ever available.

As a co-developer of the CD technology, it is only natural for Sony to rely on the proprietary CD-based architecture that gives the PlayStation its significant benefits over competing systems. Not only is it much less expensive to manufacture game title s in the CD format, but the turn-around time is about one-tenth the time of a masked-ROM game cartridge. The result: ³just-in-time" managed inventories for contented retailers.

Sony Computer Entertainment of America, a division of Sony Electronic Publishing Company, is based in Foster City, Calif. The company markets the PlayStation for distribution in North America, produces and markets PlayStation software for the North Amer ican market, and manages the U.S. third party licensing program. Sony Electronic Publishing, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, is headquartered in New York, with operating divisions throughout North America and Europe.

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