INSIDE THE PlayStation

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO SONY LAUNCHED A CONSOLE THAT ENCOURAGED DEVELOPERS TO DREAM BIG, AND CAUSED THEM THE ODD NIGHTMARE. SPEAKING WITH DEVELOPERS WHO TACKLED ITS TRICKY TECHNOLOGY, WE DISCOVER WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO CREATE GAMES FOR A CONSOLE THAT TRULY TRANSFORMED WHAT WAS POSSIBLE IN VIDEOGAMES

- NICK THORPE

Few consoles in the history of videogames have had the impact of the original PlayStation. It wasn't the first console to offer 3D graphics and CD-ROM technology, but it was a highly capable machine that was much easier for developers to work with than Sega's overly complex Saturn, and cheaper for players to buy. Though the Nintendo 64 had a clear advantage in overall power, the CD-ROMs used by Sony's console offered storage capacity that cartridge-based N64 games couldn't match, as well as cheaper games for consumers. By the end of 1998, the success of the PlayStation had catapulted Sony ahead of Nintendo and Sega into a position of market leadership, and with 50 million units sold it was well on its way to becoming the best-selling home console of all time.

Sony's rivals weren't taking that success lightly, and Sega had already launched the Dreamcast in Japan. Excitement grew to see how Sony would respond, and on 2 March 1999, Sony announced a “next generation PlayStation system” – not yet known as the PlayStation 2. Sony claimed that the hardware “massively increases the quality and performance of graphics technology to the maximum level that can be enjoyed on a television set” and possessed “the revolutionary ability to generate worlds, characters, behaviours and complex physical simulations in real-time via the massive floating-point processing power of the system”.