If you followed gaming news back in 2000, you surely heard the legend: Saddam Hussein was allegedly buying thousands of PlayStation 2s to build a missile-guiding supercomputer. For years, this was dismissed as an internet joke or media hype. But a new revelation has proven that while Saddam might not have pulled it off, the government’s fear was 100% real.
Kazuhiko Aoki, the legendary developer behind Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Trigger, recently confirmed in an interview that Japan imposed severe export restrictions on the console due to these concerns.
More Powerful Than a Top-Tier PC?
The cause of the panic had a name: The Emotion Engine. The PS2’s processor was a 128-bit beast capable of complex mathematical (vector) calculations essential for missile guidance.
- The Comparison: A PS2 ($299) delivered 6.2 Gigaflops of processing power. A high-end Pentium III PC at the time barely scraped 1.0 Gigaflop.
Essentially, Sony was selling a supercomputer for peanuts (at a loss) to make money back on games. For foreign militaries, this was a golden opportunity to acquire cheap processing power.
History Proved Them Right
Aoki revealed he couldn’t even get a dev kit shipped to Hawaii because of anti-weapon laws. And the fear wasn’t unfounded: years later, in 2010, the US Air Force actually connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 units to create the “Condor Cluster,” a real supercomputer used for radar image processing. The Saddam legend might have been fake, but the PlayStation’s warfare capability was very real.
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