While teasing an upcoming interview with the creators of Flower at ThatGameCompany, a site called Gamezine quoted co-founder Kellee Santiago on how the game takes unique advantage of the Playstation 3. According to Santiago:

The grass system really leverages the PS3 to render 200,000 blades of grass simultaneously, and gives the player this sense of blowing wind through them. An artist friend of ours came to us, really hoping that we could tell him some clever trick that we used to make it look like we had so many blades of grass. He was reluctant to believe that really [programmer] John Edwards just made it happen on the SPUs. It really would be impossible to make it look the same on any other system. But, it's one of the pros with knowing your game is exclusive to a specific system - you can really design everything towards that one platform.

An SPU is a "synergistic processing unit", which means nothing to me but is apparently a unique part of the Playstation 3's Cell processing unit. I don't doubt that a talented developer like ThatGameCompany would have made Flower work on another system, but that's beside the point. Anyone who's played the game can tell you there's something special about the way it captures the simple act of wind moving over a field of grass. If the Playstation 3's hardware deserves some of the credit, bully for the Playstation 3's hardware.

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