Sony PlayStation: The Definitive Review
A station, for playing.
It would seem a bit remiss to exclude myself from the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation launch, particularly as that machine carries a totemic quality that few other consoles can claim. Its bold, almost defiant proposition would have seemed ludicrous or impossible a few years prior to its arrival. Its subsequent impact, both in terms of technological leaps and sociological diversifications, cements the PlayStation as a locus around which the modern idea of the videogame coalesces. Never before had a machine so definitively marked a change of epoch, and short of direct neural interfaces or whatever, it’s unlikely any future gaming hardware will do so again. This might seem a tragedy if you’re unaware of how colossal the shift was. At the time it felt epic in scale, a true revolution. In hindsight it seems somehow larger still, such is the apparent stasis left in its wake. We live in an age of incremental steps rather than grand strides, although it could be argued that, aside from online functionality or the horrors of increasingly atomised commercialisation, the PlayStation represented the end of an era of revolutionary leaps. Its full-bodied commitment to the credo of realtime textured polygons is the defining mode we still enjoy today, and without the need to push into graphical avant-garde territories like vector clouds or gaussian splattering, perhaps the PlayStation’s planting of that textured-triangles flag, marking this undiscovered country as the only territory it was designed to explore, is what marks it out from contemporaries that were afraid to leave the old modes of sprites and tiles behind.1
One thing that surprised me about the PlayStation reaching 30 is the fact that Edge magazine is even older. Back in late 1993, Edge launched as the herald for the new age that the PlayStation would eventually lead, and that first year of issues is a spectacular document of videogaming undergoing one of its most significant chrysalis periods; the mature form was becoming clearer, the grand leap’s true range coming into focus. Of course, the PlayStation embodies the Edge spirit more than the Saturn or N64 ever could hope to. Issue 6 featured PlayStation launch title Ridge Racer on the cover as the signifier for the new era of textured polygons. The image was actually a screenshot of the Namco arcade version in action, so more a happy accident than some deliberate promotion of PlayStation, but issue 11 saw the PlayStation hardware, then under its PS-X moniker, make its debut as the first of the 32-bit machines to get an Edge cover all to itself.2 To me, this inextricably links the whole cultural thrust that Edge represents directly to the PlayStation and I can’t help but associate the machine’s sober, clean lines and grey-blue colourway to Edge’s own tasteful and considered graphic design.3 It’s a shame that PlayStation had its own logotype, as I reckon it would have looked fine in Gill Sans bold or Frutiger condensed light. In any event, there seems to be some kinship in visual approaches that isn’t quite so resonant with the Saturn’s regional variant typefaces (baroque serif for Asia, a bastardisation of Comic Sans for the rest of us) or the N64’s brutalist oblique caps and fancy 3D-projection icon. Perhaps what allies Edge and PlayStation most acutely is the novelty; the sense of a fresh debut bringing a new air of advancement and maturity. Apart from 3DO, which followed a weirdly similar track to the MSX initiative that Sony had participated in, the PlayStation’s competitors were all legacy companies that may have a wealth of experience but shared particular baggage that they had to carry. Sega and Nintendo still had that tie to childhood that Sony didn’t, and hence Sony seemed the coolest simply because of that sense of newness, that lack of childhood reminders. The PlayStation was allowed to be for adults and happily occupied that space, much as Edge did.
It’s part of the PlayStation legend that it was promoted with postcards perforated to make the perfect roaches for joints and had demo booths implanted into chill-out rooms of mid-90s clubland, but it’s probably true that PlayStation would have been the perfect comedown companion even if it hadn’t plumbed such a deliberate path. I definitely remember near-eternal Tekken and Wipeout sessions starting at 3am, not to mention the time I made a friend nearly piss themselves with an impromptu animation of the demo disc T-Rex, using the controller to turn its head and flap its jaw for a spot of comedic ventriloquism. By accident or design, the PlayStation slotted perfectly into the adult demographic of Gen-X that had been that first population of childhood gamers. It slid in almost effortlessly, feeling like the most correct of the big three. As the second half of the 90s progresses, the format pillars fall into place. 1997 and 98 are the years of PlayStation’s claim to cultural dominance, seeing Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night land as 1997’s PlayStation exclusives, coming a year after Resident Evil, but allowing the PlayStation to meet the challenge of the N64’s global launch with remarkable confidence. Consider that this is the same year that Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, Starfox 64 and Pilotwings 64 all launch worldwide. For 1998, the N64 gets Ocarina of Time, Yoshi’s Story and 1080 Snowboarding, but PlayStation plays exclusive home to Metal Gear Solid, R-Type Delta, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer Type 4, Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Rival Schools and so on. It’s a tale of real momentum, of an immensely fertile format that develops a spectacular catalogue to cater for the full spectrum of videogaming tastes, all while allowing the development and growth of new genres springing from the affordances of powerful 32-bit hardware and 700mb storage media. Again, you can’t imagine this happening ever again, of some company wading in with arguably the best hardware solution and carving out a dominating position from nothing.
I can’t really remember my first sessions with the Saturn or N64. I certainly recall recoiling in horror at Saturn Daytona USA’s aggressive pop-in, and realising you couldn’t really casually dally with Mario 64 and had to commit to get the real fun from it, but I couldn’t place that initial play session, that opening introduction to the machine’s personality and the games chosen to debut it. But I do vividly remember my first night with a PlayStation, staying up into the wee hours with Tekken playing in black and white on a PAL CRT, using a tiny launch gamepad. I was a mere button masher then, but I was so gripped with Tekken’s CGI cutscenes that I tried to beat Arcade mode with each character just to watch the ending animations. It all seemed so incredibly modern, even if the aching cramp in my palms recalled 1980s agonies with Speedking joysticks and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. Even as a confirmed Sega fanboy, I couldn’t deny reality - PlayStation was obviously going to win this round, no matter what Sega could pull from AM2 to bolster its battle. As I got to know more titles, I remember mastering the drifting of Ridge Racer and finding Sega Rally lacking in giving the same sense of precision and extremity at the very ragged edge where simulated performance meets biological capability. And of course, despite a valiant effort from Virtua Fighter 2 to capture our imaginations, Tekken 2 became our friend group’s key session title. I even went as far as printing out a giant FAQ and finding moves (notably multi-part throws) that were seemingly absent from other guides. Naturally we had our time with Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64, but Tekken 2 dominated right up until Tekken 3 dethroned it. And such was the case even post-Dreamcast and Soul Calibur. But this was just what my friend group played. I was surprised to find other cohorts of Worms devotees, or people who loved on-death pad-swap sessions in the original PlayStation release of Grand Theft Auto. Where it seemed that the N64 had a universal quality, where everyone played Goldeneye, the PlayStation felt broader and hence more open to niche interests. You certainly weren’t able to hop between arcade-perfect versions of Rainbow Islands and Super Puzzle Fighter on the way to blast through Time Crisis on the Nintendo hardware. In fact, this disc-hopping sense of the grand videogaming jukebox seemed closer to the mature collections you’d find with 8-and-16-bit home computers than it did a Megadrive or Super Nintendo library. Certainly things like the Platinum range and relatively easy piracy helped, but it was telling that I knew far fewer Saturn owners and of those, even less had libraries anything like PlayStation enthusiast collections.
If anything, the 30th anniversary of PlayStation shows how static the current paradigm is. It’s a common complaint from me, but the idea that the current era began in 1994 should be sobering for anyone who remembers the breakneck pace of the decade prior. To draw on that corollary with Edge yet again, I recall reading Zzap 64’s beautifully prescient ‘Zzap Back’ sections, an in-period retro re-review of older games, and how the idea of a game from just twelve months earlier felt so obviously, terribly old. The 8-bit magazines were documenting the culture unfolding on a monthly basis as it changed on a monthly basis, where the differences between the games of 1984 and those of 1986 were almost generational, such was the rate of change. And thus, epochs could be defined by year instead of by platform, and the sense of aging was acute. Thinking back to the likes of Ridge Racer and Tekken, or platform luminaries like Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid, those games still feel like they carry some charge of newness, of some inextinguishable youthful vitality. I’d give two reasons for this. One, I’m simply old. Two, those titles are part of the same wave of modernity we’re currently surfing. I may like to point to the PlayStation 2 as being the console on which the truly modern games first arrived, but those PlayStation stalwarts are their vestigial predecessors, much as the blocky, low-colour pictograms of 1970s hardware bore ancestral traits that the 80s would explore, complexify and eventually mature. Only with PlayStation it was about realising the possibilities and signposted potentials that had brewed out of the 8-and-16 bit gaming melees. As I’ve written about before, realtime polygons were always profoundly aspirational in the 1980s. They signalled both the cutting edge of now and the dizzying possibilities of the future. In a real, tangible sense, polygonal realms were our dreamed-of future destinations. And perhaps it’s that satiated generational desire, that fulfilment of the future’s promise, that those signature PlayStation games, not to mention the platform itself, encodes. A step never to be repeated, which thirty years on feels just as thrilling.
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This is true of the Saturn, 3DO and Jaguar, which all offered traditional 2D hardware. Only the N64 would share the PS1's devotion to 3D, but came nearly two years later and famously fucked it all up by sticking to low-capacity cartridges rather than optical media. Some people may try to insist that instant loading was an acceptable trade-off, but if that's the case, why did the next three Nintendo consoles jump to optical? ANSWER THAT, FUCKOS.
For reference, the Sega Saturn didn't get a cover until its PCB was featured for issue 23, and the N64 got a wireframe cover for issue 29. Take note that the PlayStation had two covers before either of those. The only other machine from that era to grace an Edge cover was, rather quixotically, the lowly Neo-Geo CD for issue 15.
It's probably fairer to point towards a zeitgeisty trend in general for cleaner, sans-serify design when you consider how much Edge was looking towards another 1993 debut, Wired. It's probably worth pushing for even more cool points by pointing out that Mondo 2000, which dates back to 1989, was well into a sans-serif phase by 1993.