This Week In Retro: The PlayStation

December 3, 1994: We Were NOT (red)e*

by Diamond Feit 

When I repeatedly describe the medium of video games as young, I must confess I do so with an ulterior motive of self-reassurance: Video games can't be that old because I'm not that old. The Atari 2600 launched before my first birthday; the NES arrived in New York City mere weeks before I turned nine. My contemporaries and I watched the console business grow and mature alongside ourselves, making each new generation all the more astounding.

The worst thing about growing up is the fact that you eventually have to face your teenage years although as a teenager yourself, you wrongfully assume you've figured out life and all the adults trying to give you advice don't know what they're talking about. I retain vivid memories of the early 90s when I simultaneously decided that only I had discovered the correct attitude towards politics, sports, sex, drugs, and even organized religion. Do I even need to tell you how miserable I was during this phase? I'm amazed I made it to the age of 17 without seriously harming myself or angering someone else enough to visit harm upon me.

Graduating from high school, going to college, and immediately failing most of my classes made me realize that maybe I hadn't figured out jackshit about the world. It also forced me to work for a living since I couldn't picture a return to academia and my mother didn't want me sitting around the house 24/7. Fortunately, my newfound income helped me secure the latest video game platform out of Japan, one that came not from Nintendo or Sega but the electronics giant Sony. 30 years ago this week, a new contender entered the console wars called the PlayStation and this unassuming grey box permanently reshaped the marketplace.

A lot of factors contributed to the Sony PlayStation's game-changing success, but none had a larger impact than its reliance on compact discs. Wikipedia will tell you that CDs first hit store shelves back in October of 1982, but they still struck most laypeople as futuristic technology in the early 90s. I grew up listening to music on records and cassettes, so the idea that a paper-thin plastic pancake could not only hold an entire album but allow me to jump around and hear my favorite tracks in any order sounded too good to be true. I knew CDs could store data like movies and even video games, but I saw that as a privilege for people with state-of-the-art home computers; early attempts to pair consoles with CDs came in the form of expensive add-ons which I couldn't afford.

The PlayStation didn't attach to another device or a computer tower, it was a stand-alone system that ran on CDs. The circular lid atop the console begged to be flipped open, an inviting design that served as a perpetual reminder that your games would rapidly spin inside the machine as you played. Nintendo had redesigned the Famicom to look more like a VCR for American shoppers, but the PlayStation made no such illusions; it looked like a CD player because that's exactly what it did.

The PlayStation's commitment to compact discs did more than impress rubes like me. By swapping costly cartridges for pressed plastic, Sony offered an escape for developers weary of Nintendo's iron licensing grip. When the NES and SNES ruled the market, anyone looking to sell software for those systems had to buy cartridges from Nintendo up front. This represented a significant expense, one that put all the risk on the publisher instead of the platform holder. CDs, however, cost mere pennies to produce, and publishers passed these savings on to consumers. As retail Nintendo cartridge prices in the mid-90s soared towards $70—or more—I could find brand-new PlayStation games for $39.99 or even $29.99.

With the CD format lowering production costs while simultaneously increasing the data capacity for each game, the PlayStation era saw an unprecedented number of releases. The original PlayStation had over 4000 games, a number that exceeds the total combined libraries for every Nintendo console prior to Sony's entry into the market. This flood of software included more than just sequels to pre-existing series but also wildly experimental titles from both new studios and long-standing developers alike; looking back at past topics for my columns, this includes eclectic concepts such as Suzuki Bakuhatsu, Moon, and King of Crusher.

Some of the most talked-about franchises today came about during this era of innovation. Capcom tried revisiting a horror game concept from the late 80s which turned into Resident Evil, now one of the company's biggest hits. Konami gave director Hideo Kojima license to expand upon his primitive Metal Gear games for the MSX and he created Metal Gear Solid, an incredibly ambitious Stealth Action title that blurred the line between the player and what they saw on screen. A small business software developer saw the arrival of the PlayStation as an opportunity to try their hand at creating a three-dimensional dungeon crawler; King's Field became the first-ever game by FromSoftware, a studio now famous the world over for the Dark Souls franchise and its many offshoots.

You might have noticed a common element between all these success stories, one that Sony often heralded when marketing the PlayStation. While by no means the first home console to support 3D graphics, the PlayStation's advertising made a big deal of its capabilities to convince potential customers that 3D graphics would become the new standard for video games. The system supported plenty of sprite-based 2D games—Mortal Kombat 3 arrived within a month of launch in the U.S.—but every print ad and TV commercial emphasized the potential of polygons.

Sadly, this trend helped forge an attitude amongst video game critics and fans that 3D visuals were simply better than 2D by default, as if everything we had played and enjoyed prior to the 90s no longer mattered. Not only did this inclination inform the types of games that Sony approved for release on the console, I believe it convinced gaming audiences that pixel-based graphics held no value. This negativity haunted the entire medium for the next decade, and I fear it continues to poison corporate attitudes against proper preservation of gaming history.

Anti-2D slander aside, I bought hard into the future that Sony promised me. My strongest PlayStation memories, especially of the early years, all include a sense of astonishment that games could offer such immersive experiences. Whether light and happy (Jumping Flash!), perplexing (Intelligent Qube), or downright sinister (Tecmo's Deception), the 3D perspective won me over and kept me playing for hours at a time. My friends and I would gather around the PlayStation every evening, often continuing straight through until dawn.

Of course, our all-nighters were only made possible by the fact that as teenagers, we could conceivably drive ourselves around town without the need to ask our parents. My employment status also meant that I had enough cash on hand to buy a PlayStation without selling another console, an unheard-of luxury when I had started saving my allowance to buy my NES in middle school. These factors, combined with Sony's savvy sales tactic to target older demographics, meant that a PlayStation actually felt like a status symbol at the time—a sign that I had grown-up and my games had grown-up with me.

With the clarity of hindsight, at least part of my affection for the PlayStation came from teenage naïveté. By the time I got my hands around Sony's ergonomic controllers, I had spent 15 years playing video games. I had also just witnessed legislators at the highest level of the American government paint video games exclusively as playthings for children. The burgeoning young adult inside me yearned to see my hobby shown some respect just like I too wanted respect.

Fortunately, history shows that the success of the PlayStation wasn't just a flash in the pan or overblown hype. After their CD-based game console sold 100 million units, Sony released a DVD-based game console that performed even better. And as much as the PlayStation 2 would serve as a harbinger of current industry trends, that generation-defining machine would never have come out if its big brother's gambit to court teens and adults had failed.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.
*Patreon does not support colored text, alas.