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.

Comments

And to think...

[pappy97]

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.

Launch titles....

[hollismb]

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 disagree

[Carlos Rodriguez]

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.

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:PS VS SS

[ZosX]

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.

Re:Third-Party Developers

[Fred Or Alive]

Personally I think the original digital PSX controller is fine. It's just the lazy way they hacked the analogue contollers on - it's really annoying the way the left hand analogue stick isn't in a good position especially. (Unless you play games where analogue controls don't matter). Analogue triggers would be nice as well...

Resident evil

[dcstimm]

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).....