30 years of gaming (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
For the 30th anniversary of PlayStation, GameCentral looks back at the launch of the PS1 and how it revolutionised the world of video games.
The original PlayStation arrived in the UK on September 29, 1995. As was common at the time, that was almost a year after it first launched in Japan, on December 3, 1994. That means the console, and the entire PlayStation brand, is now 30 years old. It’s easy to feel cynical about the current state of PlayStation, given this is not exactly a banner year for Sony, but that shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow the significance of the anniversary and what is arguably the most important console launch ever.
Before PlayStation, the games industry was dominated by Nintendo and Sega, with the PC only really coming into its own as a games machine around the same time as Sony entered the business. Consoles like the NES, SNES, and Mega Drive played host to many classic video games – the best of which have aged far better than anything on the PlayStation – but until the release of Sony’s first console, gaming was considered an activity purely for introverted tweens.
That pop culture image took a long time to evolve, but the marketing for the PlayStation was a sea change just as important as the move from 2D to 3D graphics. Suddenly games were being sold to adults, or at least older teenagers, and concerted efforts were being made to portray it as a cool and socially acceptable activity. PlayStation has done many positive things for gaming, but nothing has ever been more important than making it clear that anyone can, and should, play video games.
I was just out of university when I first saw a PlayStation. Although thanks to the year’s delay it was Sega’s Daytona USA and Namco’s Ridge Racer, which appeared in early 1994 in the UK, that were my first introduction to the brave new world of 3D graphics. Two years before Super Mario 64, I remember being at an arcade in Margate and standing amongst a large crowd of people flabbergasted by Sega’s racer and what, at the time, seemed to be the first ever photorealistic graphics.
Fast-forward a year and the fact that Ridge Racer seemed to run identically (it didn’t but there were no YouTube comparison videos in those day) on the PlayStation was equally mind-blowing. Not only that but Ridge Racer looked so effortless, whereas the home version of Daytona USA, on the Saturn, was so badly compromised it set Sega into a tailspin of irrelevance from which it never recovered.
The rest of the launch line-up in the US, where the PlayStation arrived only a few weeks earlier than Europe, was completely unremarkable, with quickly forgotten 3D fighter Battle Arena Toshinden taking advantage of the small window before Tekken arrived in December. But the UK launch had one game that neither the US nor Japan had: WipEout.
Only a launch title in Europe (Reddit)
Made in the UK by Liverpudlian studio Psygnosis, the game was overly difficult to control (the original PlayStation controller did not have analogue sticks) and very frustrating but it embodied the new sense of identity for video games far better than any other title. Ridge Racer’s 3D graphics were amazing, but the game itself was nowhere near as cool as WipEout, with its artwork by The Designers Republic and music from Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers, and Orbital.
Then there was the drug reference in its name: Whip E (as in *ecstasy*) Out. Whether that was intentional or not has never been clear but print ads for WipEout also courted controversy by appearing to show two players that had suffered a drug overdose. Of course, that was denied but it made the game, and by association the PlayStation brand, attractive to young adults who otherwise would’ve been the first to dismiss video games as mere kids’ stuff.
None of this was by accident. Instead of having to queue up at Toys ‘R Us or Dixons, jostling with six-year-olds to get a few minutes on a console demo unit, Sony ensured they had a presence at music festivals and other events where they could demonstrate the console to an exclusively older demographic.
Interestingly, WipEout was never anywhere near as successful in the US or Japan, but then this was a time when Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (as it was then) had full autonomy to develop, publish, and promote games exactly as it saw fit. They judged, correctly, that WipEout would be much more appealing to a European audience, and it was only in later generations, when line-ups became more homogenised, that the franchise began to get sidelined and forgotten.
The way the PlayStation was marketed was completely different to anything that had gone before but it’s also easy to forget what a massive difference it made that PlayStation games came on CD-ROMs instead of cartridges. That was the reason Final Fantasy 7 ended up on PlayStation instead of the Nintendo 64 and having mainstream music in a video game, not to mention large amounts of spoken dialogue, was a seismic shift as important as any other brought on by the PlayStation’s release.
Everything about the PlayStation was revolutionary, from the technology to the games, to the marketing and, most importantly, who that marketing was aimed at. The Sega Saturn may have offered little competition but while there’s no question the Nintendo 64 had better games, it was the PlayStation that was far more popular and disruptive – the seismic shift that took gaming mainstream and opened it up for more people and more companies than ever before.
Apart from a stumble during the PlayStation 3 era, Sony has managed to stay on top ever since, although with the PlayStation 5 generation you do very much get the feeling that they’ve forgotten how they got here. PlayStation is still the default console brand for the majority of people, particularly in the UK, but that’s now more out of a sense of tradition than because Sony is doing anything new or inventive.
That’s not necessarily a sign of neglect but as Microsoft and Sony continually complain about a lack of growth in the industry perhaps both could look back to the lessons of Sony’s first video games console, to see how the original PlayStation revolution was achieved.
Everyone knew what this meant at the time (X)
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