PS5 Designer Says Original Concepts Were Even Bigger

The PlayStation 5 is big. Much larger than any modern console these past few generations, but according to its designer the original drawings for Sony’s next-gen games console were supposedly even bigger.“It’s kind of funny that engineering actually told me it’s too big,” PlayStation 5 designer Yujin Morisawa said in an interview with The Washington Post. “So, I actually had to shrink it down a little bit from the first drawing.”

At 15.4 inches tall, the PS5 dwarfs the competition pretty easily. It outsizes the Xbox Series X and even the hefty Xbox One by a good amount as well as past Sony systems like the original PlayStation 3.

“I knew it was going to be large because I know how much power there was going to be, so I knew how much airflow you would need and how much space for a heat sink,” Morisawa said. “We wanted to get it much smaller, so it’s the perfect size right now.”

Morisawa says that any smaller and there would be less airflow for the PS5 that would “disturb” the players while playing.

While the PS5’s sheer size is still staggering in its final form, the form factor allows all of the internal components to behave efficiently. And while the hardware may have dictated the size, Morisawa says the actual design and form factor was for aesthetics.

“When you design something, you want to make it feel comfortable. Sometimes it looks like a plant or some animal or some object. I think that’s more comfortable than something weird, or something that they’ve never seen before,” Morisawa says.

Check out IGN’s full review of the PS5 here, as well as our PS5 wiki for a full rundown of everything you’ll ever need to know about the system before launch. We also have reviews on PS5 launch games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and (talkin’ about) Bugsnax.

Matt T.M. Kim is a reporter for IGN.