From Bedrooms to Billions: The Playstation Revolution

This is a great documentary - hard to even call it a documentary it really is more of a really fun joyride taking the viewer on trip though the history of Playstation and game development.

Loved the direction, the interviews, the clips and the story telling. It was a pleasure to watch!

This is a good movie, and had some good interviews with the Japanese developers and creators. That said I felt that the structure of the movie was a bit disjointed, I got that they needed to talk about how 3D was new and designing for it meant a lot of experimentation and discovery for developers but they talked about that before the launch, it made me think they were totally skipping over the launch and the way the PlayStation was marketed. As someone aware of the general timeline I was able to piece it together but it did seem a bit unusual to me to pace it like this. And though it's not a Sega documentary, it never came back around to how much the PlayStation blew the Saturn out of the water, especially outside of Japan, it left it hanging. The last third which covered the PS2 onwards felt a bit rushed and lightweight, and the PSP/Vita were never mentioned at all. Really the story of the PS2/3/4 etc. Could be a story unto itself, I felt there was a lot more that could have been said about the original PlayStation and its landmark games and their development that could have set up the second documentary covering the PS2 onwards era.

I still enjoyed it but not as much as the first Bedroom to Billions documentary, I had similar feelings about the Amiga documentary - that seemed to trail off on the fate of Commodore and the Amiga.

A fine addition to the B2B series but not without flaws.

I've watched all three Bedrooms to Billions films this week and that may have intensified some of my negative feelings about this most recent entry. The Playstation Revolution starts off in much the same fashion as its immediate predecessor, with a deep and technical examination of the birth of the PS1. And crucially, as the filmmakers did so successfully with their Amiga film, the context in which this development took place is a key part of the story.

But then that part of the story comes to an end and then we start to skip through what to my eye looked increasingly like promo (or even propaganda) for the Playstations 2 through 4. It's already a very long film so I understand why additional length might not have been desirable for anyone, but the story of the PS3's Cel processor, while touched on here, isn't really explored, so why include it at all? What made this chip so revolutionary but so hard to program for? I dunno, because it was... And if we pass beyond the era of PS1, surely we now need to bring Xbox into the story for context and comparison. By the time we reach the PS4 section we've descended into pure corporate promo.

If you enjoyed BtB 1&2 you'll like the first section of this film. It's just a shame the filmmakers couldn't show more restraint and confidence in that aspect of this story as they ultimately morph from documentarians into advertisers.

(All that said, I'd still watch a BtB4.)

If you're looking for a great documentary to highlight PlayStation's launch, this is the one for you, but be prepared to hear the point in English, then the same point in Japanese twice more right afterwards.

E.g.: English: "We wanted to launch and sell 100,000 units in Japan day 1, that'd be a good number for us". Followed by the Japanese version right after that took over 4 minutes: "Normally Sony only launches with 5000-6000 units for a new product launch, but PlayStation we wanted to launch with 100,000 units, which is not something Sony normally does. So that's different from normal. So we had to change a lot to do that. We had to produce in mass quantity, which is not something Sony does - so it was quite different from what we did at that time. Then we had to deliver those units to the stores for sale". No new valuable information from this entire section of the film and an utter waste of time IMO. This process repeats...A LOT.

By the middle of the documentary, I was just fast forwarding through every piece with Japanese speakers as it was always 100% repetitious.

After years of waiting, the team here has delivered what can only be described as a masterpiece in field of video game documentaries. Just simply a phenomenal, and intimate view into the industry during the 90's to the mid 2000's, featuring interviews from everyone of the era including Sony execs, engineers, devs, dozens of developers and development heads - and even Sega.

Truly everything I wanted from an industry documentary about the most important, and monumental generational shift in videogame history.

Thank you!