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The PlayStation Turns 20

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-now-you-feel-old dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The 3rd of December marks an auspicious date in gaming history: 20 years ago today, the very first PlayStation went on sale in Japan. In that time, Sony has successfully muscled its way into the gaming scene, and seen off a few rivals as well. In a new retrospective, a writer looks back at how Sony's console series has changed gaming, from introducing the DVD and the Blu-ray disc to innovations like the second screen PocketStation and the still untapped power of Remote Play and Gaikai game streaming.

1 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"second screen" innovation by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2, Interesting

    introduced bluray and dvd (were those sony first?)

    Yes, Sony has been consistently in front on optical media. The PS was the first successful console with CD-ROM, the PS2 was the first console to have DVD (GameCube had a proprietary disc format, Dreamcast had CD-ROM with a more capable proprietary disc format. XBox could do DVD but came out after PS2 and unlike the PS2 wouldn't play video DVDs out of the box--you had to buy the special controller). PS3 was the only console of its generation to have BluRay (Wii had yet again a proprietary format, and the XBox 360 had a DVD out of the box, with an HD-DVD add-on drive that flopped completely).