Yes, you read that right.
The biggest console in modern gaming history started out even bigger when Sony senior art director Yujin Morisawa first put pen to paper. “In the beginning, when I started drawing, it was much larger even though I didn’t know what engineering was going to do,” Morisawa said in an interview with the Washington Post. “It’s kind of funny that engineering actually told me it’s too big. So, I actually had to shrink it down a little bit from the first drawing.”
At over a foot tall and weighing almost 15 lbs., the PS5 is enormous. Some might say even too big. Kotaku reviewer Ian Walker described the console’s outer shell as “bulbous” but not “so unwieldy as to completely dominate a room’s aesthetics.” Kotaku’s Mike Fahey called the PS5 “drunk” in his head-to-head comparison with the Xbox Series X. “I keep looking over at it, wincing, and shaking my head,” he wrote. Much internet ink has already been spilt referring to it as the Eye of Sauron.
“I tried to sculpt the invisible mass in between the player and the mechanical engineering,” Morisawa told the Post. “That’s how I describe it. There’s something in between hardware and the player, and that should be expressed.”
The PS5 is certainly expressing something.