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PlayStation is 10 years Old Today
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.
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.
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).
Sony killed the Nintendo PlayStation project
(yes the SNES CDROM was called that)
Sony backstabbed Nintendo, such nice fellowes? eh?
Then made their own system (using their own parts and design).
however Nintendo was not playing fair anyhow by holding a nasty liscence agreement on who gets the royalties on games
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.
There'd be no:
H HH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Gran Turismo
Xenogears
3D Final Fantasies
Bushido Blade
Puzzle Fighter
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
AlsoI would have probably more bored through college (or more drunk).
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
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.
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", 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.
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.
Well.
I feel old now.
Keep forgetting where I put my dentures, too.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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 from being ported because they didn't want the competition for VF2. Which was just stupid. There was no competition for VF2, short of Tekken 3...
So while Sega was busy being dicks to their 3rd party devs, Sony was raking in the dough from license fees. What I really can't fathom is how Sega made this mistake. This was a company that used to run adds in VG&CE and Gamepro showing off how many 3rd party games the Genesis had. This was the company that got it's ass kicked by Nintendo because Nintendo locked in all the top 3rd parties.
Then there was a ton of infighting between SoA and SoJ over the next gen console. SoA wanted to run with a 32x+CD based system (ala the TurboDuo, yes, it was that bad an idea). Or maybe it was just a cartridge system, I can't remember. Either way they wanted to get people on an upgrade path. SoJ of course wanted Saturn.
Finnally, no rant about the Saturn would be complete without mentioning the second SH-2 that couldn't access memory while the other one did. Wanna know what made the Saturn such a bitch to program? Try hand coding Virtual Fighter 2 in assembly so you could use both processors sometime (no joke, it really is all hand coded assm. I guess that's why the UI is so basic).
What I've read online blames one Bernie Stolar for the whole mess. All I know is he's pretty universially revialed among hardcore Sega fans. You'll notice he was canned around the time of the Dreamcast (and unfortunately walked away with a Golden Parachute). Too little, to late I guess.
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>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.
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).....
keanmarine.com
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 confused that an old timer like me *plays games*. Huh?)
...is the sega saturn Japanese controller/2nd generation USA controller. That pad combined the best of everything, great dpad, 6 buttons perfect for street fighter, not big or too small or unbalenced in any way... Bliss. :)
The worst controller I have ever used is a tie between the xbox 1st gen pad and the n64 pad, the xbox dyke was a giganto piece of shit and even my big hands had a hard time using it. The n64 pad also sucked cause of its awkward layout, it worked for games like goldeneye and mario64, but it sucked for real fighting games, which explains why there really wasn't any, and it just didn't work IMO...
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'd have to disagree. While the PSOne had a boatload of impressive games, I think both the NES and Atari 2600 were much better consoles for there times and had a much more innovative collection of games. I guess it's all about what you grew up with.
To me, the best PSOne game was FFVII, which is one of the best RPG's I've played ever. The only thing I can recall enjoying more than FFVII was Ultima 4 on my Apple II.
All right... that's it. I'm tired of the worthless "moderation" system here at Slashdot! You people make no sense with your scores!
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.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.