The PlayStation 2 Supercomputer

Sony’s 100 Pound Rendering Monster

Dr. Aki drifts through a zero gravity spaceship. Her hair floats weightlessly, catching the soft reflections that ripple across her suit. It looks like a scene from a movie, specifically Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, unfolding with the precision and polish of a high-end cinematic production. Then, someone picks up a controller.

The camera shifts, and lighting adjusts. The entire scene responds in real time.

This isn’t pre-rendered. It’s not a cutscene or a playback. It’s happening live, rendered at full HD resolution and 60 frames per second.

And this was the year 2000, a time when video games were nowhere near capable of visuals like this.

That summer, Sony unveiled a machine unlike anything the world had seen before. Sixteen PlayStation 2 systems were fused into a single black cube, not designed as a console or a workstation, but as a real time graphics supercomputer built to erase the line between games and film.

They called it the GScube.