If you were old enough in 2000 to follow video game news, you probably remember an urban tech legend regarding Saddam Hussein's attempt to purchase thousands of PlayStation 2 units to link them into a supercomputer capable of missile guidance, which supposedly leveraged the console’s Emotion Engine chip.
While it was eventually proven that this was just a legend, a recent statement from a lead Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Trigger developer confirmed that the Japanese government of the time was concerned the Sony console could indeed be used for military purposes due to its unusual power for consumer hardware at the time.
Speaking in an interview conducted by Famitsu to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ninth entry in the Square Enix series last year, spotted by GamesRadar+, Kazuhiko Aoki commented on the development of Final Fantasy IX, which was conducted at a Square Enix development studio in Hawaii, providing a rather interesting revelation.
"Come to think of it, towards the end of my time in Hawaii, I was asked to check whether FFIX would run on the PS2 by sending some sort of PlayStation 2 test equipment," Aoki-san said. "However, at the time, the PS2's CPU was so powerful that there was a possibility that it could be diverted for military use, and so exports were restricted."
While Saddam Hussein nor anyone else ever launched a missile with the help of a PlayStation 2-based supercomputer, concerns were grounded, as already mentioned, in the PlayStation 2’s unusually high performance for a consumer device of the era. A single PS2 unit with its 128-bit SIMD-capable Emotion Engine was capable of a theoretical 6.2 Gigaflops, considerably more than a high-end Intel Pentium III PC, which was capable of roughly 1.0 Gigaflop in comparable workloads.
In addition to its theoretical max power, the PlayStation 2 was made potentially appealing for military applications by its two Vector Processing Units, which were well suited to highly parallel mathematical workloads such as trajectory calculations.
Ultimately, what raised the most concern was the PlayStation 2's unusual price-to-performance ratio. Sony was selling "supercomputing" power for just $299, a price point achieved by selling the hardware at a loss to recoup costs via game sales. This created a unique loophole where a foreign military could theoretically acquire significant processing power at a very low price.
As Aoki-san’s experience in Hawaii illustrates, the idea of consumer consoles attracting military interest was not entirely fanciful. That concept later became reality when the US Air Force built the Condor Cluster in 2010 using 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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