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Classic Games (Games) PlayStation (Games)

PlayStation is 10 years Old Today 82

Posted by Zonk from the i-love-my-old-PSOne dept.
pluke writes "ComputerandVideoGames.com reports that today is the 10 year anniversary of the PlayStation launch in Japan. Facing stiff competition from the already entrenched Sega Saturn it went on to conquer the market and define the modern games industry. Happy Birthday old boy, though I must confess was always a Saturn man." Sniff...so many memories.
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PlayStation is 10 years Old Today More

PlayStation is 10 years Old Today

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  • And to think... (Score:4, Informative)

    by pappy97 ( 784268 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @07:14PM (#10992635)
    The Playstation and PS2 never would have happened if it weren't for Nintendo pulling the plug on the CD-ROM add-on for SNES.

    People say Nintendo's biggest mistake was Virtual Boy. I say it was dropping this project allowing Sony to get into and dominate the console market.

    • Re:And to think... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "People say Nintendo's biggest mistake was Virtual Boy. I say it was dropping this project allowing Sony to get into and dominate the console market."

      Sony didn't need Nintendo's CD-ROM to do this. It's not like Nintendo showed them how to make a console. The Playstation was coming one way or another. Either it would have gone out as the SNES CD (thus dilluting Nintendo's brand. The reason the project broke down was that Sony wanted to have its name plastered all over it) or as a stand alone unit. Ei

      • Re:And to think... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by pappy97 ( 784268 )
        Go take a look at history of consoles in '90's. Sony NEVER had any intention of releasing a stand alone console. They never even thought about going into the console market until Nintendo dropped that project.

        If Nintendo doesn't drop that project, perhaps that unit as an SNES bombs and Sony never thinks twice about consoles.

        To say that Sony would be even a player in the conole market if Nintendo didn't drop that project is pure speculation.
        • "To say that Sony would be even a player in the conole market if Nintendo didn't drop that project is pure speculation."

          That point defeats what you're saying as well. Sony has always shown interest in entertainment devices. It's not all that reasonable to assume they wouldn't have tried it in one form or another at some point. At best, Nintendo caused it to happen a little sooner. There's a difference between cause and influence.

      • I disagree (Score:5, Informative)

        by Carlos Rodriguez ( 136019 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @09:18PM (#10993600)
        While I agree that Sony would sooner or later have released its own console, it would have arrived later rathen than sooner if not for Nintendo's actions. Had Nintendo just killed the project Sony would quite likely still have been allied to Nintendo for a while. In fact, according to "Revolutionaries at Sony [amazon.com]", a Sony approved "biography" of the original Playstation, Ken Kutaragi, the creator of the Playstation, had tried to convince Sony's upper management to release their own console, but the plan had always been rejected because Sony was happy just being a provider of parts for the Nintendo consoles.

        That same book details what happened. The problem was that Nintendo, instead of just pulling the plug for Sony's original Playstation (which was a SNES/CD-ROM hybrid platform), went behind Sony's back and formed an alliance with Philips to develop a SNES CD-ROM add-on. One day after Sony announced that it was working along with Nintendo to develop the Playstation, Nintendo announced that it was working with Phillips to develop the true SNES CD-ROM and that Sony's project wouldn't come to light. This conference made Sony's management appear as complete fools.

        Kutaragi saw his chance and told the President of Sony that they could go ahead with the Playstation project and release it as a stand-alone console. The main reason why Kutaragi's plan was approved was not because of a great business plan, but because he stressed how it would be the best way to get even with Nintendo.

        Virtual Boy was a mistake, true, but while it was a dismal failure it didn't cause Nintendo's presence in the market to shrink one fourth of what the original PS did just a couple of years after its introduction.

        • Re:I disagree (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:34PM (#10994025)
          Disclaimer: I am _not_ NCL or SCEI, but the following is fact.

          Nintendo's deal with Philips was not a nonsensical backstab at Sony, as this official Sony biographer claims. (That is merely a case of the "winner" writing history.) It was a response to a Sony licensing agreement that limited Nintendo's ability to have any say in what happened on the Playstation side.

          Basically, Sony was restricting Nintendo's ability to license (and therefore profit from) CD-based games. The PlayStation was, in Sony's view, a Sony machine that also played SNES games. You want to make Playstation games? You go through Sony, and Nintendo is out of the picture. Otherwise, you make a SNES game and, hey, Playstation will be able to play it.

          As such, Sony expected to hold total control over the CD-ROM business, while Nintendo's technology (SNES) became less and less relevant with time. In time, SNES compatibility would not have mattered, much like the way PlayStation is now a dead-end compared to PS2 development.

          Additionally,_ALL_ of Nintendo's future technical development (future consoles, etc.) would depend on a partnership with Sony, giving them leverage to squeeze more and more out of Nintendo. If they moved away from that partnership, they would have already lent credibility and market experience to a competitor with huge killing power.

          So what did Nintendo do? They took a chance to get out of the situation they were stuck in: They partnered with Philips (a non-Japanese technology provider) and announced an exclusivity agreement. This was a move to sour Sony on progressing with their plans to enter the console space. This was Nintendo's gamble, and they lost.

          So is Nintendo's handling of Sony their biggest mistake? In the big picture, yes. Sony snuck into the console industry under Nintendo's nose using their own platform, and when Nintendo finally noticed what was happening, they were almost powerless to stop it.

          Virtual Boy...big deal. Every technology company has their own Virtual Boy. Microsoft themselves have had the equivalent of at least three Virtual Boys in their lifetime, and yet they have the power to dictate policy to national governments. But I digress.
        • Virtual Boy was a mistake, true, but while it was a dismal failure it didn't cause Nintendo's presence in the market to shrink one fourth of what the original PS did just a couple of years after its introduction.

          The PS hurt nintendo, but so did their refusal to launch a disc based console. The N64 could render some nice graphics, but without lots and lots of textures and FMV like you can fit on a disc, the graphical quality of their games was limited.

          LK

          • Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)

            by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:33AM (#10995129) Homepage Journal
            "The PS hurt nintendo, but so did their refusal to launch a disc based console."

            That isn't all that clear. The fact is, Nintendo got 30 million units out the door while Sega... well their Saturn was a huge flop despite being CD based. Nintendo could not have released a CD based system to compete with the Playstation and survived. In order to get a reasonable cost, they'd have to toss the 64-bit processor and go with something less distinct than Sony's offerings. Additionally, they would have made less money on media royalties going with a CD based system. The gamers out there may not care, but look what happened to Sega.

            A lot of people keep saying that the N64 failed. 30 million units is not a failure. A lot of people keep saying that the N64 lost out due to a lack of a CD-ROM drive. I can sort of agree with that. It would have been cool for that machine to have an optical drive. But not if the machine ended up costing $350 dollars. Nintendo would still have had a huge uphill battle. They did the right thing by making a cheaper machine that had better graphic capabilities.

            The real key to Sony's success wasn't so much the hardware, though that helped. Rather, it was that it flooded store shelves with titles. Yes, many of them were awful. But when it came time to decide which machine to get, it was hard to ignore that the Playstation was where the action was. That is where Nintendo 'failed'. They're just not getting the developer volume they need.

            Fortunately, though, Nintendo has created its own audience. Nintendo has loyalty that Sony just cannot have until they start creating their own AAA titles. In other words, Sony's boat could easily be rocked by another company with whiz-bang technology. It could be Nintendo. It could be Microsoft. Heck, it could be IBM if they were so inclined.
            • Even back then, optical drives were not very expensive; however, they were slow. The story gamers were told was that Nintendo backed out of producing CD-ROM units because the load times where too high.

              Of course, that doesn't exactly jive with the idea of the SNES-CD :)

              On the other hand - did we ever expect the SNES-CD to be any better than the SEGA-CD, a unit not-so-powerful as the Playstation?
            • The gamers out there may not care, but look what happened to Sega.

              The gamers who care are the reason that what happened to Sega happened.

              We got sick of getting abandoned every other year. Sega made no secret of the fact that every system that they released was just to raise money to develop the next one.

              Why spend all of that money on Sega's latest and greatest when you know that in two years they'll discontinue it and take all of the developers to their new platform?

              LK
            • In regards to the Sega Saturn, you can't exactly use it as a reason for people wanting or not wanting a CD based system, either. CDs were still new at the time, and no console had proven their worth at that time. Sure, there were a few games that emerged for the 32X or Sega CD (and also the Amiga CD32, to a lesser extent) that had shown some full motion video (FMV) content, but nothing showing how the capacity could really be used.

              The Saturn never made a huge impact on the US. You simply won't find a larg

            • A lot of people keep saying that the N64 failed. 30 million units is not a failure. A lot of people keep saying that the N64 lost out due to a lack of a CD-ROM drive. I can sort of agree with that. It would have been cool for that machine to have an optical drive.

              In the end, I bought a PS instead of a N64. I would have rather had a Cartrage based system, and paid the extra money to avoid the load times involved with CD based games, but the games themselves on the PS are what made me choose that over a N

  • Launch titles.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hollismb ( 817357 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @07:23PM (#10992720) Homepage
    Ah, memories. The two launch titles for the PS1 (yes, there were only two!) were Toshiden and Ridge Racer. Toshiden was a graphical masterpiece that played like Street Fighter, and also, um, sucked. Ridge Racer, on the other hand, was an amazing game, and an arcade perfect conversion to boot. It had only one track, that had a couple different branching paths (based on difficulty) and that was it. Nonetheless, the hardcore, broke college boys that we were, we'd race that damn track over and over and over again, trying to shave precious hundreds of seconds off our times and striving for the perfect lap (which was basically impossible to do two laps in a row).
    • I actually had a Sega Saturn. I figured at the time Sega had a history of consoles like genesis and master system, boy.... was I wrong. Street fighter Alpha was the only decent game, and that's pushing it.

      I sold my Saturn for a Playstation. It was the single most insane investment I have ever made. I had zero money in my bank account cause I ran out and bought so many games. Classic twisted metal was the greatest thing.

    • Ah, memories. The two launch titles for the PS1 (yes, there were only two!) were Toshiden and Ridge Racer. Toshiden was a graphical masterpiece that played like Street Fighter, and also, um, sucked

      IIRC Street fighter the movie was released at launch with the PS one also. You might have blocked it out since the game sucked.

      Actually, I looked it up [vidgames.com] because I thought I recalled more games being available at launch. I was right... ESPN Extreme Games, Kileak - The DNA Imperative, Raiden Project, Ridge
    • I spent at least $200 in the arcade playing Ridge Racer, and it was an amazing game. And it was more amazing that the PS1 was able to duplicate that arcade experience to the last detail.

      Too bad I didn't have the Logitech Driving Force Pro, so I could actually steer/gas/brake like in the arcade.

  • greatest consol ever (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VendingMenace ( 613279 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @07:47PM (#10992925)
    in my humble opinion, PS1 is the greatest consol that has ever existed yet. I own an xbox, ps2 and gamecube and while they are quite good and have impressive abilities wich outstrip the ps1 however, there is just something special about the ps1 and the line up of games that it had.

    Just a quick review, from the top of my head...
    Twisted metal
    Castlevania SYmphony of the Night (best game ever, i think)
    Tony hawk series
    FF VII
    metal gear solid
    tekken 3
    and the list goes on and on...

    I could go on forever, PS1 truly was the greatest of the consols in the golden age of the consol.
    • I think that the Ps1 existed in a golden age when games really innovated and 3D was just coming in. There was a LOT of shite on the playstation, but I think in the lastest generation the signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves has decreased a lot.
      I guess now crap games can sell better on their increased polygon counts, so more crap is available. Playstation sits between the restricted, yet highly innovative 16bit console game, and the humoungously powerful, yet often just that, 128bit console games.

      This
      • Sorry to deceive you, but the number of bit does not matter much in console. Look at this:

        (formely Mattel) Intellivision : 16 bits
        atari: 8 or 16 or 32 bits depending of the models.
        Nes: 8 bits
        Master System/Game Gear: 8 bits
        Neo Geo: 16 bits
        Snes: 16 bits
        Turbo Grafix-16 : dual 8 bits
        Genesis: 16 bits
        CD-i: 16 bits
        3DO: 16 bits
        SegaCD/ JVC x'eye: 16 bits
        Saturn: 32 bits
        PSX: 32 bits
        PS2: 32 bits
        Saturn: 32 bits
        X-box: 32 bits
        Dreamcast: 32 bits
        (Ultra) Nintendo 64: 64 bits
        Jaguar: 16
        • I think Sega claimed the Dreamcast was 128 bits becuase it could do operations on 128 bits at once (SIMD?), and it's stuck with lazy games journalists, I think I've seen things about 256 bits, when the next gen systems are probably going to be 64 bits...
        • On the subject of the Jaguar, it's 64 bit. It had a 16 bit cpu, but it contained other processors (an object and a blitter) that were each 64 bit RISC chips. It's not that a "16 bit chip contained a lot of 64 bit instructions," whatever you meant by that.
    • Castlevania SYmphony of the Night (best game ever, i think)

      Defenitely a well made game, great art and music. But I thought it was way too easy, expecially once you got a decent sword and leveled up.
      • OMG don't even mention Castlevania SOTN. At first I rented it, and I thought it was the same old boring 2D action. Returned it...

        A year later I found out from www.gamefaqs.com that you can beat the game like 4 times and the castle flipped and I get the whip guy later. I ended up buying this. I could not believe this thing had a higher replay value than sports games.

        To my surprise the japanese version was supposed to be even better!? Which is absolutely ludicrous.

    • I think people always have a soft spot for there first console. I love my Sega Mega Drive. Lots of slashdotters seem to think Nintendo can do no wrong, and I bet the NES was their first console. I bet just about everyone thinks there generation / system was the apex of gaming.

      As I said, I love my Sega Mega Drive. You are obviously completely wrong, the Mega Drive was far superior to the PSX. It's so superior I don't need to justify my arguments, because I'm just right. The SNES is a bit better than the PSX
    • I don't think there's really any such thing as the greatest console ever, just the one that was lucky enough to get the best software. My vote on this matter would have to go out to the SNES. Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mario Kart, Contra 3, Yoshi's Island, Donkey Kong Country, Mario RPG, Starfox and the like ushered in a golden age for platform and RPG gamers the likes of which hasn't been seen since. The graphics were just good enough that they wouldn't distract from the gameplay
      • My vote goes to the SNES. I still play mine today, but this time I use a Flash Cart [tototek.com]. I own over 30 carts, and the flash cart lets me play the rest on a real SNES. The SNES really popularized console-style RPGs. Sure they appeared first on the Atari 2600, but the SNES had a high number of high quality RPGs.

        It was also good for fighting games. It had the best Street Fighter II ports at the time. It also had the best version of the original Sim City. It wasn't overly complicated like its sequals, but i
    • You forget that the Tony Hawk Series was released on N64 and PC, and Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid were also released on PC.
  • There'd be no:
    Gran Turismo
    Xenogears
    3D Final Fantasies
    Bushido Blade
    Puzzle Fighter

    AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
    AlsoI would have probably more bored through college (or more drunk).

  • PS VS SS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by computertheque ( 823940 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @08:37PM (#10993353)
    The Playstation came bringing with it one very important factor, which is what I believe is the only reason it became as large as it did. It was easier to program for than the Sega Saturn. I'm sure that after a while Sony did things to entice publishers, but that is the main reason it got the upper hand. It's no secret that developers did not like the dual processor nature of the Saturn, and the Playstation's better internal structure allowed for titles to be made with ease. The Saturn did 2d very well, a key reason that it plays home to so many Capcom fighters. People seem to forget that the Saturn did very well in Japan, and was still doing moderately well even after the Playstation was killing in America. The surprising thing about the entire story is how loyalties were changed from the established name of Sega. That's not to say that Sony wasn't an established name, but not in gaming. It truely was a case of the underdog's success. While I do like what the Playstation brought to the game world, I do not favor how Sony has brought things into the mainstream. Sure it allows for more growth, but it has also brought about many unfavorable things. Your average game is now made for the lowest common denominator, resulting in unchallenging difficulty and bland properties. Don't even get me started on the Urbanization of games. Definately a key moment of gaming history.
    • well shit, I was hoping that I didn't need to use line break code for text formatting

      • Re:PS VS SS (Score:2, Informative)

        by ZosX ( 517789 )
        Preview is your friend. It takes what, 5 seconds to look at your formatting? Secondly you should really try to break up your writing into paragraphs anyways with the first sentence defining the rest of the paragraph.

        Oh and you don't have to use line breaks. Just format the text how you would like it and post it as plaintext. Slashcode will recognize carriage returns and such from the text box.
    • I'm serious. My favorite 'SoA were dicks' story was how Working designs was selling memory cards (they got tired of people with cheap, faulty cards calling their support line bitching about lost saves) and Sega calls 'em up and says: "hey, you're not licensed to do that, stop". So Working Designs (which, you will remember, was a pretty important 3rd party dev.) says" "that's fine, how do we get licensed?". To which Sega more or less replied: "You don't".

      Then there's how they were discourging fighters fr

  • Third-Party Developers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <`vasqzr' `at' `netscape.net'> on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:03PM (#10993872)

    That is the only thing Sony did right.

    The Playstation sucked as far as hardware goes. Long load times, crap graphics, the console itself wore out in a short amount of time (only a new PSX sits right side up), the controller is an ergonomic nightmare.

    I'm going to state the the SNES was the greatest console to ever grace the earth. Now that I have that out of the way...

    The PSX was expensive and not very good. Why did it succeed? Nearly anyone could develop for it. It wasn't THAT hard to program for. Unlike the Saturn. You could distribute on CD-ROM. Unlike Nintendo 64 where you had to use expensive ROM chips which only came from, you guessed it, Nintendo.

    Nintendo had problems back in the SNES/Genesis days with third parties. Green blood in Mortal Kombat? Missing Fatalities? People don't want watered down games. Sony fulfilled the gore/sex that adult gamers wanted.

    The games were usually graphical nightmares, and the console wasn't impressive AT ALL compared to a PC in 1995. A Pentium 100MHz was pretty good in software rendering, and if you throw in a 3Dfx card that came out about a year later...It's no contest. When I saw my friends raving over a PSX FPS, and the sports games, I went back to playing my GLQuake, and NHL 96 at 640x480.

    Compare an SNES to a PC game in 1990. No comparison.

    Sony won by having a TON of games. They also didn't care what you made. They were glad to have you as a developer. They also made demo discs popular. You can't distribute cartridges with a magazine or pass them out at sporting events. Well, you could, but you'd lose a ton of money.

    • The blood wasn't green. It was gray. For sweat. Had you actually owned and played an SNES, you would know this(it was what the Genesis owners had over us for a summer). Hell, I'll go pop in the cart and double check... yup, gray.

      The SNES wasn't released until 1991. Now, the Super Famicom was released in 1990, but only in Japan.

      Now, in 1990, to use the japanese release date of the Super Famicom. We got Wing Commander(woah, that was really almost 15 years ago!?), Police Quest 3, Star Control, and Ulti
    • I agree with you with Console VS PC in 1995. But in 1990, console beated PC hands down. Snes/genesis graphism are much better than EGA graphism. PC did not even have good sound card back then: Genesis music beats Adlib/Roland/PcSpeaker.
      I remember that NHL hockey was much better on genesis than PC Pc started to catch up circa 1993 with Doom and Mortal Kombat releases .
      As for computer in general, Amiga had always had great gaming potentiel.
      • Please spell/fact check your posts, because not a single thing you said is correctly spelled, or factually accurate.

        We had VGA graphics(not graphism) when the SNES came out for instance. The Amiga's time was over by then, so you might as well bring up the fucking C64 for all the relevancy it has.

        Also, the first Soundblaster was out by 1990(1989 actually).

    • LOL (Score:4, Insightful)

      by News for nerds ( 448130 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @07:28AM (#10995624) Homepage
      >A Pentium 100MHz was pretty good in software
      >rendering, and if you throw in a 3Dfx card that
      >came out about a year later...It's no contest. When
      >I saw my friends raving over a PSX FPS, and the
      >sports games, I went back to playing my GLQuake,
      >and NHL 96 at 640x480.

      That kind of PC costed over $2500 then IIRC.
    • One thing about the graphics: they didn't have to be as bad as they were. Far too many games tried to stretch the console for 3D, but a few didn't. The biggest one that comes to my mind is Valkyrie Profile, which did a great job of showing that the Playstation could do excellent 2D graphics. VP has more detailed environments, fluid animations, and fancy particle-based spell effects than anything the SNES could accomplish, without the boxy lego-man effect that so many 3D games on the PSX had.
    • How can you say the PSX dual shock controller was an ergonomic nightmare after the horror that M$ unleashed with the first XBox controller? Not to mention the fact that my original Dual Shock controller is still functional, unlike those classic N64 controllers .... you know, the ones where the joystick would wear out after a few months use?

  • Shit. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jkujawa ( 56195 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:16PM (#10993947) Homepage
    Well.

    I feel old now.

    Keep forgetting where I put my dentures, too.
    • Yes we are all old now. :( Do you remember the old guys telling you how the C64 was king in the 80's? Well we are now them.

      Go huge your Genisis/SegaCD/32x now. I am.
      • I *was* one of those C64 guys.

        • Re:Shit. (Score:2, Funny)

          by Dunce ( 171397 )
          Well that is great!!! Now we have 2 gen of Video game geeks.

          You want to hear something funny, I had pages from EGM taped to my wall of the Saturn. Oh well, here is to our youth.

    • You feel old now? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @01:00AM (#10994630) Homepage Journal
      Go to the mall. Look for cute girls. They are all too young for you.

      I've been feeling old since I was about 22.

      LK
    • I remember advent melting a pdp11 running rsts c.a. 1978 in my first job at a research institute (John Innes) outside Norwich UK. Even the guys who drove tractors in the field were sitting in front of the terminals. Even though my friend could barely put together an articulate sentence without the word "fuck" he was entranced...

      Good days.
      "You are in a maze of twisty passages"
      "this is not the maze where the pirate leaves his treasure"

      Sigh (On the few occasions I teach others programming they get really con

  • Resident evil (Score:3, Informative)

    by dcstimm ( 556797 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @12:12PM (#10996386) Homepage
    Resident evil is what made me buy the playstation, I remember going to my local video game store and dropping down 399 or 299.. forget the price for my shiny new psx. and then going to kmart and getting resident evil (because they were the only people that had it) and having them look though every drawer to find it. Oh the memories. God those were good times. But wow resident evil blew me away the games graphics and FMV were very very impressive. Thank you sony for making my childhood a better place. But that experience is still shadowed by almost every release of a mario game. Mario 1, (first video game ever), Mario 3 (jaw dropped when seeing the rotating question mark boxes), Super Mario Brothers, and of course Mario 64! (good lord that game made me excited).....
  • I wish my Playstation was constructed with half the uality of my ancient Turbo Duo (PC Engine) that old cd based system is still going strong like I bought it yesterday, while my PSX barely works if I manage to get it leaning at the correct angle (I fixed the worn guide bar for the laster, now I think it is having some other issues.
    Sony may sell a lot of console, but they dont last for shit compared to real manufacturers.

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