If you were an obsessive video game fan in the summer of 1994, you’ll remember where you were when Edge magazine’s August issue dropped. By then, Sony had already announced its intention to develop the PlayStation console – the previous October – but it was the cover feature in the world’s most forward-looking game publication that really blew open the possibilities of the machine. As well as listing its specifications in full, Edge secured enthusiastic statements of support from Capcom, Namco and Konami. One breathless developer told the mag: “It’s going to revolutionise the way computers are at the moment.” Suddenly, the whole structure of the console games business was being threatened. All it needed was a push.
Sony’s entry into the video game industry has become the stuff of legend (and probably, one day, the stuff of a passable Netflix movie). In the late 1980s, the company was keen to get a foothold in an increasingly profitable business after the failure of its MSX games computer, so when the chance came up to build a CD-Rom drive for the soon-to-be-released Super Nintendo (SNES) console, Sony leapt at it. In the background, however, Sony’s engineering genius Ken Kutaragi, was also designing a standalone system, the PlayStation, capable of playing SNES games as well as a new CD format that Sony itself would control.
Nintendo sensed the threat to its hegemony. Consequently, when Sony announced the PlayStation at the giant 1991 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Nintendo immediately revealed that it was in fact cancelling the deal and would instead partner with Philips to produce its SNES-based CD add-on. Sony was left shocked and humiliated; the jilted bride at the tech industry’s grand cathedral. Various theories about Nintendo’s motives have been put forward, but most obviously, this was about a very protective company wresting back control from an ambitious consumer electronics rival. Whatever really happened, the PlayStation was dead. Or was it?
Well, no. It wasn’t. Instead, a furious Sony scrapped its Nintendo-based tech and Kutaragi began work on a new games machine, codenamed PS-X, designed around a powerful 32-bit Risc processor with a built in co-processor named the Geometry Transformation Engine designed to handle the mathematics of fast, detailed real-time 3D visuals. At this stage, in the early 1990s, the company made two crucial decisions: it signed a development deal with arcade legend Namco to produce titles exclusively for the new PS-X, and it sent its engineers on a worldwide tour of developers, enticing them to support the console with exciting 3D graphics demos. Sony brilliantly capitalised on widespread frustration with Sega and Nintendo, which had spent years locking publishers into restrictive and complex licensing deals, but it also enticed coders and artists with its thrilling tech. By early 1994, it had 250 companies signed up to create games for the machine, battering the meagre support accrued by rival multimedia consoles such as the Philips CDi or 3DO. There was a sense of growing momentum.
When the PlayStation launched in Japan in December 1994, it was up against Sega’s much-anticipated Saturn, an ostensibly similar 32-bit CD-Rom machine, backed by that company’s biggest arcade titles, Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter. At first, Sony seemed to falter, the machine’s launch failing to attract the same sort of chaotic queues that had greeted the Saturn a few weeks earlier. But then, as the US and European launch-dates drew closer, both the hype and the software library grew. Titles such as 3D fighting game Toh Shin Den, platformer Jumping Flash!, and racer Motor Toon Grand Prix showed off the visual potential of the machine, with rich, detail 3D environments and smooth vehicle and character animations. By the close of that year, Wipeout and Tekken had joined the roster – beautiful, thrilling games loaded with attitude and perfectly exemplifying the Sony philosophy: if it’s not real-time, it’s not a game.
From 1996, Sony really began to push the PlayStation as a lifestyle accessory rather than just a kid’s toy. Sony London’s head of marketing, Geoff Glendenning, famously got the console into nightclubs and music festivals; the huge advertising company TBWA was employed to develop a fresh image for the machine as something cool and desirable, culminating in 1999’s award-winning Double Life commercial. But more importantly, the console’s approachable development environment and Sony’s excellent support for third-party studios led to an era of fervid experimentation.
Look back now at titles such as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Driver and we see the origins of modern 3D game design: open, explorable worlds, genre-defying design, cinematic narratives. We saw Namco easing into its role as a semi-first-party creator, pushing its Ridge Racer and Tekken franchises to new technical and design heights. We saw Japanese publishers easing away from their restrictive relationships with Nintendo and Sega to bring lavish epics such as Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid.
But vitally, the PlayStation also brought an undercurrent of eccentricity and playfulness. From PaRappa the Rapper to Vib-Ribbon to LSD: Dream Emulator, music and imagery were explored to sometimes bewildering effect. And while twentysomethings loved Tony Hawk and Tekken, children were not left behind – this was also the era of lovable cartoon platformers: Jumping Flash, Spyro, Croc and Crash Bandicoot. When Nintendo finally released the N64 in 1996 it found PlayStation had already claimed a large part of its potential audience. Another layer of Sony’s long revenge.
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The original PlayStation would go on to sell 100m units over its 10-year lifespan. It broke the monopoly enjoyed by Sega and Nintendo and it cemented a range of giant gaming franchises that still prosper today. At the time of its launch there was uncertainty over the CD-Rom format, which was slower to access data than cartridges, but Sony used its expertise with music and movie tech to overcome the obstacles and establish the format as the future. Its industrial design was excellent – a sleek, grey machine that fitted in beside your TV and video recorder in the living room; an innovative joypad; those cute little memory cards; that start-up animation with its swell of music. The TV ads made you want one, the launch price (£$299 compared to the Saturn’s £$399) made it accessible.
But when you look back at that Edge magazine feature, published months before the Japanese launch and followed by many other similar assessments in the gaming press, it already felt as if something momentous was happening. The quotes, the specs, the demo screenshots seeming to lift from the pages. If the success of the PlayStation wasn’t inevitable at that point, it was as near as you will ever get in the notoriously unpredictable business of video games.