PlayStation 20th Anniversary

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03 December 2014 @ 08:49 am

Wow, the original PlayStation came out today in 1994, happy 20th anniversary!

I'd actually forgotten it was out that early. I'm sure i knew about it at the time, but at this point the first time i can remember ever thinking about it was when Square announced that Final Fantasy 7 would be a Playstation exclusive at the start of 1996. I finally picked up a used PSX during the summer of 1997, when i was sharing a room in a subletted apartment with

kirinn. (The first time i ever lived away from home and not in a dorm.) It came with a bunch of PSX games, most of which were pretty crappy. The only ones i recall at this point were Beyond the Beyond and Resident Evil. However i did pick up a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics when i went to Japan that same summer and spent awhile playing that before FF7 came out in the US, the real reason why i'd gotten the PSX of course.

I played a bunch of FF7 (including beating the Weapons) and a bunch of FFT (though mainly after getting the English version later, i got stuck in the Japanese version.) And then eventually Wild Arms, FF8 & 9, Azure Dreams, Xenogears, Breath of Fire 3 and 4, Brigandine, Bushido Blade, Einhander, Monster Rancher, uh, i'm sure there are more, but that's what's coming to mind right now. (And that's only after a quick glance at the list of all games on wikipedia.)

But yeah, there were two and a half years of the PSX being out (although just two years in the US) where i didn't own one and only occasionally even thought about it.

Know what else happened in 1994 though? I started college.

We're reached the point where things that happened during college have started having 20th anniversaries. I feel really old now =P

Tags: history, video games

17 comments | Leave a comment)

17 comments —

( 17 comments — Leave a comment) )

kirinn on December 3rd, 2014 06:38 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I mean, I was still playing FF6 on SNES in 1994/5, what did I need a PSX for? Pretty sure I picked mine up only when FF7 finally came out.

Looks like my PSX game list has 30-odd games on it, probably second only to PS2 for games/comsole. (Much love to SNES, but man those carts were expensive and to be savored.)

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khedron on December 3rd, 2014 07:26 pm (UTC)

kirinn - wait, now I see you through two different pathways!

PSX - ah, those were indeed the days . Man, I used to fantasize about being able to play FF7 while commuting from Hyde Park to Evanston on the Metra. So many hours wasted that could have been spent exploring & levelling up! We still have a box of our old playstation games in the basement. And they're still playable on the PS3! My wife was replaying FF9 last year!

The most un-RPG PSX game on my list: Parappa the Rapper.

Edited at 2014-12-03 07:26 pm (UTC)

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donaithnen on December 9th, 2014 09:57 pm (UTC)

Damn! I totally forgot about Parappa the Rapper in my list! The first ever (popular) music game!

Wait, you can play PS1 games on the PS3? Is that only for the original backwards compatible PS3s? Or did knowledge about that feature just fall through the cracks for me?

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khedron on December 10th, 2014 04:17 am (UTC)

I *believe* that PS1 compatibility is present across the PS3 line, and not just in my long-suffering PS2-backwards-compatible console that finally bit the dust last summer. I'll pop in FF7 sometime - it's in the living room TV console, since my wife was playing it not that long ago!

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kirinn on December 11th, 2014 08:36 pm (UTC)

I feel your pain - I too had a full-hardware-BC PS3 that, after several sort-of-fixable problems, finally hit a permanent yellow light of death last summer. Now I have a slim model that's much quieter and I'm vaguely wondering if my old boxed-up rather flaky PS2 would still run at all. And I'm kind of cranky about a couple recent save games I lost.

But yeah, I think all PS3s play PS1 games.

The non-RPGs on my PS1 list include, let's see, Bushido Blade, Castlevania SotN, Gundam Battle Assault 2, Incredible Crisis, Misadventures of Tron Bonne, Spyro 2, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

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donaithnen on December 9th, 2014 09:55 pm (UTC)

Well you definitely didn't need one for the summer of '97 ;)

And i think the limiting factor for SNES games, for me at least, was mostly having to depend on my parents for games. Plus not having easy access to anyplace that sold used games.

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matrixmann on December 3rd, 2014 08:07 pm (UTC)

20 years it's been already? How much time passes... And if there will be a number 5, well, we'll see.

I think in 1994 the rave thing finally got ready to go. At least I think the first Rave Now! compilation was released then.

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donaithnen on December 9th, 2014 09:59 pm (UTC)

Sadly i did not find out about raves until... 2000 or 2001? When i did learn about them i really wanted to go to one, but never did figure out how. I had to be content with goth clubs because they were so much easier to track down.

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matrixmann on December 9th, 2014 10:22 pm (UTC)

May just depend one where one lived then. In Europe they had a different kind of culture than overseas. Also, the big bang of this thing needed some time to go around the world. Living closer to the center of it makes you get earlier in touch with it. (Notice that on purchasing CDs these days from then - I guess it's an advantage to rather live in Europe than in the United States. Because, first, you earlier get a hold of things and, second, you don't nessecarily have to keep duty in the back of your head.)

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silmaril on December 4th, 2014 06:56 pm (UTC)

FF7 was the console-buying game for me too.... Please ignore the fact that it was around 2004 though :D.

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donaithnen on December 9th, 2014 10:03 pm (UTC)

Well late is still far better than never! :)

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khedron on December 10th, 2014 04:27 am (UTC)

I had never owned a console before FF7. Not even an Atari -- I went from a TRS-80 to a dual-floppy IBM PC. (Dual floppy as in no hard drive!)

By the time FF7 rolled around, I'd even stopped playing most computer games apart from Civ or games made by people I personally knew. (Marathon & Myth!) FF7 changed all that, and led me on a path which leads now to my wife playing DA:I downstairs on the PS4 right now. I should go check in.

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kirinn on December 11th, 2014 08:38 pm (UTC)

Wait wait wait, you know the original Bungie guys? Nice. If you still do, tell them I loved all their Mac games. ;)

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khedron on December 12th, 2014 09:46 pm (UTC)

Even Oni? ;-)

Bungie basically started in one of the dorms at the University of Chicago, and a friend of mine was a small part of that and worked on Myth, Marathon, and ... my goodness, what was it called? Damage Incorporated? The one where it was basically a squad-based FPS and you had to think occasionally about who you took on which mission. For example, taking the black ex-preacher on the mission to spy on the KKK got complicated.

I didn't play Minotaur; the earliest I played was Pathways into Darkness, and I loved Marathon 1 & 2.

When we were beta-testing Myth or Myth 2, we ran into a funny problem. While playing as intended, this wasn't an issue, but it turned out that when both sides cooperated and made a giant pile of explosives, and then threw both armies into the pile simultaneously, you could have more either 16k or 32k objects flying through the air, I don't remember which, and the game would crash due to overflow. They had to fix that because of us. :-)

(YouTube recently had a similar problem with the play count on Psy's "Gangnam Style". OK, a few more than 32k at work, but same idea.)

I've forwarded your note to the guy I know.

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kirinn on December 14th, 2014 05:04 pm (UTC)

Okay, okay, so I never really played very much Oni (though I liked the *idea* of it when it was in development) or Damage Inc. And I honestly can't remember whether or not I successfully completed Pathways Into Darkness.

But the Marathons were pretty much the only FPS games I ever got into, and I got into them enough that I made a fairly elaborate fantasy version of our undergrad dorm as a Marathon II arena that we used for a few LAN parties in the computer lab. And then later I got into the Myth community enough to help host a tournament or two while I was in grad school. Somewhere in the depths of my archives I have replay files of explosive piles very much like that. There was a hilarious map made by... what was that group's name something about tartan death rabbits... featuring a shallow swimming pool and lots of dwarves, which always led to huge accumulations of water-logged explosives. Good times.

Anyway, good of you to catch that bug in beta, because *of course* people are going to do that. ;)

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corneredangel on December 5th, 2014 01:15 pm (UTC)

And then eventually Wild Arms, FF8 & 9, Azure Dreams, Xenogears, Breath of Fire 3 and 4, Brigandine, Bushido Blade, Einhander, Monster Rancher, uh, i'm sure there are more, but that's what's coming to mind right now.

Maybe it's just me, but for what that's worth, what I liked the *most* about those years was the manageable pace at which the games came out - you had just enough time to beat one and save up for the next, and then, bam, there it was!

...never did beat Einhander, though. Then again, hey, the disc is right there, and my PS2 is right there too, so what's *my* problem!

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donaithnen on December 9th, 2014 10:09 pm (UTC)

I think i beat Einhander, but there were some... alternate endings? Bonus weapons? Something extra that i wanted to get but never did.

I'm not sure how much of that was games coming out at a more manageable pace and how much was right around then being the last time i had a lot of free time to spend on games.

Summer break before my senior year, finishing off a couple classes the summer after that. Then a couple months looking for a job, 3-5 months at the job, then taking some more classes and another 3-4 months looking for another job after that first company shut down. A lot of game playing got packed in during that period and there are _still_ some PS1 games i'm still meaning to get to some day.

Actually, it wasn't quite the last time. The year i spent unemployed between the game industry and my current job i played a lot of games too. 200 hours i think into Disgaea and 100 hours into FF10. Plus Ico and a couple other things i'm not coming up with right now.

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