30 years of the PlayStation
This month marks 30 years since the release of the first PlayStation, though I can't remember exactly when it became available in Britain.
Coincidentally, my partner brought up the subject of gaming consoles, while we were in the pub the other night. I think he's entertaining the idea of getting one.
'Is that XBox thing we saw in Costco better than the other one we saw?', He asked.
'The PlayStation 5? I dunno much about gaming these days. I prefer the look on the XBox, but personally I'd go with the PlayStation, because that CoPilot recall thing really has made me wary of Microsoft.'. I followed that up with a mini tirade, as one does after a few pints, about AI being shoved in our faces by practically every corporation.
'Would you get one?'
'Depends on what the PlayStation actually does. Besides playing games, I mean. They're around £400 for the version with the disc drive and decent storage, you know. If it has Netflix and plays DVDs...'
Admittedly, I'm more ignorant than ever when it comes to the gaming industry, and I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the two versions of the latest XBox. I really like my Nintendo Switch, and most the games I have for that are ~20 years old: Final Fantasy VII and Crisis Core, MGS 3, GTA collection, Doom 3, Quake II, that sort of thing. I rarely have the time to play them these days.
But, 30 years ago...
For most of 1996, I was quite enamoured with my Sega Master System, and the small collection of used games cartridges I'd acquired. What I really wanted was a Mega-CD, though.
'Wait until the Sony PlayStation comes out. It's way more advanced than the Mega-CD.', Friends were saying.
The story goes like this: In 1990, Sega released the Mega-CD, which was an add-on for the Mega Drive. Quite impressive it was, too, by the standards of the time. Nintendo also wanted a CD-ROM drive for their SNES, so it made a deal with Sony to design and manufacture one.
For whatever reason, that project didn't work out, and Sony decided it was capable of repurposing the CD-ROM prototype/design to develop its own gaming system.
Eventually the PlayStation hit the stores, along with a lineup of interesting games that were fundamentaly different to anything we saw running on previous consoles. The minimalist, slim, gray design of the PlayStation, and the packaging of that as a serious piece of hardware, was a genius marketing idea - the PlayStation wasn't a games console for teenagers, but an entertainment system for adults with expendable income. A much wider range of potential buyers with the money to spend. Apparently the median age of gamers was 26 (though the term 'gamer' wasn't in common use then). Sony's market share would dwarf that of Nintendo and Sega since.
I bought many Official PlayStation magazines, which came with the demo discs, over the following decade, and read enlightening interviews with the developers in the games industry. That did shape my expectations of what a career in software development would be like. I became knowledgeable about the industry, about which titles various firms were working on, and how each game would be covering new ground in some way. Even most the games that had poor reviews were worth buying. There was so much more innovation in the 1990s.
Final Fantasy VII was truly an epic undertaking, spanning three discs. The developers of Metal Gear Solid resorted to creative ways of utilising the capabilities of the PlayStation's hardware and the CD-ROM medium.
Obviously the PlayStation 2 was hugely anticipated for a whole year before its release. People wanted the same thing, but with much higher-spec hardware, and with technologies that enabled it to integrate with other devices.
The PlayStation 2 was effectively a supercomputer, with a processor (called the 'Emotion Engine') capable of floating point arithmetic - this made it possible to render curves, instead of straight-edged polygons. It was actually possible to use the PlayStation 2 as a high-end desktop PC. If I remember correctly, there were USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, and one could install a specific Linux distribution on its hard drive.
I lost interest in gaming around 2010, largely because I didn't have the time for it, and mainly because the consoles that followed didn't seem as groundbreaking. The PlayStations 3, 4 and 5 seem variations on the same thing, with slightly different aesthetics. Same applies to games these days, when almost everything is a remake (Minecraft and Animal Crossing are exceptions).