Time goes by, and I don’t think that 1994 is that long ago. This means that the Sony Playstation (also known as PSOne has turned 20. Playstation was first released in Japan on December 3, 1994. US had to wait until September 9, 1995 and had to wait some weeks more (released in Europe on September 29, 1995).
The Playstation history is quite interessting. It started way back in 1988 in co-operation with Nintendo. Sony was supposed to make a CD-ROM attatchment to the Super Nintendo.
Play Station was announced by Sony on CES in 1991. But that joy didn’t last long, as Nintendo the day after announced a co-operation with Philips instead. As the history shows, Philips made the CD-i and released some Nintendo-licensed games (which includes a couple of Zelda-games that are rated as the worsed in the series). Sony on their side continued to develop the Play Station and later released the console as Playstation.
The PSOne games came on CD-ROMs opposed to cartrigde which was very common at the time. Playstation had a 32-bit RISC processor at 33.9 MHz, 2 MB RAM og 1 MB video RAM. The resolution was from 256 x 224 to 640 x 480. PSOne also had two memory card slots to save game progress.
In the early 90s, Nintendo and Sega dominated the videogame market. Sony was a newcomer. But the Playstation was a huge suecess with about 102.5 million consoles sold in its lifetime. This makes the Playstation the fourth most sold console ever. Only beaten by Game Boy, Nintendo DS and Playstation 2.
I tried Playstation for the first time in the winter of ’96 (if I remember right). My sister and I rented the PSOne with Rayman and WipeOut. This was very fun. Rayman was a colourfull platform game, funny and with a good difficult level. There was no memory card with the unit we rented, so we became pretty good at the game. WipeOut was at the time the game that gave you the best speedracer experience. With the console, was also a demo-CD. We played that a lot too. It contained the now famous T-Rex demo which impressed us very much.
Among the most sold Playstation titles, you find Grand Turismo, Final Fantasy, Grand Turismo 2, Resident Evil and Tekken 3.
I first got a hand of a Playstation, when the PS3 was released in 2007, and hadn’t played that much on a Playstation until then. Luckily, the PS3 is PS1-compatible. Rayman and WipeOut, is still two of my favourite games, including Rigde Racer.
What is your PS1-favourite?
Photo & source: Wikipedia