20 Years Later: How Concerns About Weaponized Consoles Almost Sunk the PS2

The PlayStation 2 was positioned from the outset as a superior piece of hardware.

Marketing trumpeted its “Emotion Engine” CPU, which was built for a single purpose: pushing polygons for 3D gaming.

The company’s initial tech demo, where they re-animated a scene from Final Fantasy VIII, demonstrated a level of detail like nothing the gaming world had ever seen.

All that power caught the eye of Japan’s Trade Ministry.

In April 2000, they issued an edict: if Sony wanted to ship the PS2 abroad, they would need to request a special permit.

The law as written required any exporter who wished to ship hardware with potential military applications worth more than $472 outside the country to obtain permission from the government or face up to five years in prison.

With a sticker price of $376, that meant any kind of bulk PS2 shipments would run afoul of the law.

If the company couldn’t convince their government otherwise, American gamers wouldn’t have a chance to play Ridge Racer V or TimeSplitters on launch day.

Sony applied for a special export permit to get its new console to the rest of the world, but a few countries were blacklisted.

Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were considered potentially likely to use the console for nefarious purposes.

Here in the United States, we got the hardware on October 26, as planned.

But what exactly were the “potential military applications” of the PlayStation 2? It all came back to the Emotion Engine and its ability to process three-dimensional images.

The chip has a pair of vector-processing units that, in normal use, allow the system to calculate positions in physical space.

That functionality could be used outside the game world—say, as part of a missile guidance system.

Japan had reasons to be suspicious about foreign actors repurposing civilian technology for military means.

A North Korean submarine sunk in 1998 was found to be running a number of Japanese-made communications and radar devices.

While a single PS2 probably couldn’t aim a missile in real-time, networking them together hypothetically could.

Right-wing blog WorldNetDaily fanned the flames when it reported that Iraq violated the ban in December 2000, bringing in approximately 4,000 PS2 units.

They claimed that Saddam Hussein intended to connect them together to pilot unmanned drones or perform nuclear test simulations.

Intelligence agencies denied any nefarious intentions, and the story quickly faded from the public eye.

But the idea of networking PlayStations to do something other than play games was planted, and would soon bear fruit.

In 2002, Sony released an odd product: Linux for the PlayStation 2.

Packaged with a 40GB hard drive, a USB keyboard, and a mouse, it let consumers transform their consoles into personal computers.

It was a bizarre venture that didn’t catch on, but a group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications saw the cost-to-performance ratio for the console’s processors and decided to do an experiment.

They networked 60-70 PS2s, built a library to perform a variety of tasks distributed across their processors, and fired it up.

It worked, but not well, and a few baked-in hardware bugs caused it to require rebooting regularly.

The team abandoned the Frankenstein supercomputer and moved on to other ideas.

That wasn’t the end of the project, though.

In 2010, the U.S.

military purchased 1,760 PlayStation 3s and linked them together at the Air Force Research Laboratory to create what at the time was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

Dubbed the “Condor Cluster,” the agglomeration of PS3s could perform 500 trillion floating point operations per second and was used for analyzing high-definition satellite imagery.

The Department of Defense estimated that purchasing comparable hardware to construct the cluster from scratch could have cost 10 times as much.

While most of the PS3-based supercomputers have been disassembled and sold off, one still lives at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where it is used to run a variety of simulations.

Researchers used what they learned to develop a new generation of chips that were used in supercomputers like the Roadrunner at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Lest you think this was a dead end in history, we should take a second to examine the many other occasions that video game hardware has been used in weapons and other military functions.

One of the most notable entries comes with the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, which the US Army showed off in 2014.

The truck-mounted weapon designed by Boeing fires a focused beam of protons at airborne targets like drones and shells to make them blow up.

The control device for this weapon of the future? An ordinary Xbox 360 controller.

Boeing chose the twin-analog USB input method because it thought soldiers would already be familiar with it and require less training.

Even Nintendo, the most gentle and benign of the game companies, saw its technology co-opted by the government.

In 2008, a report circulated that the US Department of Energy had hacked a bomb-disposal droid called Packbot so it could be controlled by the motion-sensitive Wiimote.

The scientists claimed it was more intuitive to use gestural controls to guide the machine.

When the PlayStation 5 is released at the end of the year with its RDNA GPU that can process 10.28 teraflops, enterprising engineers around the world will probably start thinking about how else the hardware can be used.

Wouldn’t it be a better world if we just used it to play games instead?

The PlayStation 2 was positioned from the outset as a superior piece of hardware.

Marketing trumpeted its “Emotion Engine” CPU, which was built for a single purpose: pushing polygons for 3D gaming.

The company’s initial tech demo, where they re-animated a scene from Final Fantasy VIII, demonstrated a level of detail like nothing the gaming world had ever seen.

All that power caught the eye of Japan’s Trade Ministry.

In April 2000, they issued an edict: if Sony wanted to ship the PS2 abroad, they would need to request a special permit.

The law as written required any exporter who wished to ship hardware with potential military applications worth more than $472 outside the country to obtain permission from the government or face up to five years in prison.

With a sticker price of $376, that meant any kind of bulk PS2 shipments would run afoul of the law.

If the company couldn’t convince their government otherwise, American gamers wouldn’t have a chance to play Ridge Racer V or TimeSplitters on launch day.

Sony applied for a special export permit to get its new console to the rest of the world, but a few countries were blacklisted.

Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were considered potentially likely to use the console for nefarious purposes.

Here in the United States, we got the hardware on October 26, as planned.

But what exactly were the “potential military applications” of the PlayStation 2? It all came back to the Emotion Engine and its ability to process three-dimensional images.

The chip has a pair of vector-processing units that, in normal use, allow the system to calculate positions in physical space.

That functionality could be used outside the game world—say, as part of a missile guidance system.

Japan had reasons to be suspicious about foreign actors repurposing civilian technology for military means.

A North Korean submarine sunk in 1998 was found to be running a number of Japanese-made communications and radar devices.

While a single PS2 probably couldn’t aim a missile in real-time, networking them together hypothetically could.

Right-wing blog WorldNetDaily fanned the flames when it reported that Iraq violated the ban in December 2000, bringing in approximately 4,000 PS2 units.

They claimed that Saddam Hussein intended to connect them together to pilot unmanned drones or perform nuclear test simulations.

Intelligence agencies denied any nefarious intentions, and the story quickly faded from the public eye.

But the idea of networking PlayStations to do something other than play games was planted, and would soon bear fruit.

In 2002, Sony released an odd product: Linux for the PlayStation 2.

Packaged with a 40GB hard drive, a USB keyboard, and a mouse, it let consumers transform their consoles into personal computers.

It was a bizarre venture that didn’t catch on, but a group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications saw the cost-to-performance ratio for the console’s processors and decided to do an experiment.

They networked 60-70 PS2s, built a library to perform a variety of tasks distributed across their processors, and fired it up.

It worked, but not well, and a few baked-in hardware bugs caused it to require rebooting regularly.

The team abandoned the Frankenstein supercomputer and moved on to other ideas.

That wasn’t the end of the project, though.

In 2010, the U.S.

military purchased 1,760 PlayStation 3s and linked them together at the Air Force Research Laboratory to create what at the time was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

Dubbed the “Condor Cluster,” the agglomeration of PS3s could perform 500 trillion floating point operations per second and was used for analyzing high-definition satellite imagery.

The Department of Defense estimated that purchasing comparable hardware to construct the cluster from scratch could have cost 10 times as much.

While most of the PS3-based supercomputers have been disassembled and sold off, one still lives at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where it is used to run a variety of simulations.

Researchers used what they learned to develop a new generation of chips that were used in supercomputers like the Roadrunner at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Lest you think this was a dead end in history, we should take a second to examine the many other occasions that video game hardware has been used in weapons and other military functions.

One of the most notable entries comes with the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, which the US Army showed off in 2014.

The truck-mounted weapon designed by Boeing fires a focused beam of protons at airborne targets like drones and shells to make them blow up.

The control device for this weapon of the future? An ordinary Xbox 360 controller.

Boeing chose the twin-analog USB input method because it thought soldiers would already be familiar with it and require less training.

Even Nintendo, the most gentle and benign of the game companies, saw its technology co-opted by the government.

In 2008, a report circulated that the US Department of Energy had hacked a bomb-disposal droid called Packbot so it could be controlled by the motion-sensitive Wiimote.

The scientists claimed it was more intuitive to use gestural controls to guide the machine.

When the PlayStation 5 is released at the end of the year with its RDNA GPU that can process 10.28 teraflops, enterprising engineers around the world will probably start thinking about how else the hardware can be used.

Wouldn’t it be a better world if we just used it to play games instead?