Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Sony PlayStation in Europe. OK, OK, so it may have reached this milestone a couple of weeks ago in the US, and is rapidly approaching its sixteenth birthday in Japan, but as I’m in the UK and have a particular admiration for the good old grey slab of love, we at Tap are going to celebrate it’s 15 years!
So, what do you remember most about the PlayStation? What did it mean to you? Do you have any particularly fond memories or favorite games?
Discuss!
Email the author of this post at matc@tap-repeatedly.com
I remember as a teen when they started playing commercials on TV for FF7. It was the most impressive thing I’d seen in gaming up to that point, and it blew my freakin’ mind.
I saved up every dollar I made through work, birthday, xmas, and so on for about 3-4 months before I’d saved up enough money to buy a playstation, a copy of the game, and a memory card.
I remember going to the mall with a few friends to pick it up. We all came back to my house where I plugged it in, started playing, and went on to ignore said friends for the next 3 or 4 weeks.
My neighbor would come over every night after our parents had fallen asleep, and sneak into my room to watch me play the game, insisting I fill him in on anything he may have missed, and that I replay the particularly good CG bits if I was lucky enough to have saved them in a separate slot.
I know that’s more about FF7 then the PS, but that was how I got started on Sony’s game system. I believe the PS2 to still be the greatest gaming console to date considering its title list. And though I’d been edging towards a 360 for my next console purchase, I’ve recently been giving the PS3 far more serious thought, as I think its finally coming around.
I never owned the gray slab of love myself, but several of my friends had one, and I do remember good times being had on it. Titles that come to my mind: The Need for Speed, D, Resident Evil (though I never fancied this classic survival horror/crawler, myself), PaRappa the Rapper (this was a good one for laughs), Area 51 (a straight conversion of the arcade title, perhaps the least challenging shooting game ever imagined), Independence Day (a wonderfully awful game),Twisted Metal and Crash Bandicoot.
When the PlayStation was in its prime I was primarily a PC gamer, resulting in the original PS passing me by for the most part.
I remember not really being interested in the Playstation when it was coming out, that is until I saw the commercial for NFL Gameday. I was absolutely floored and immediately bought one.
I have many found memories gaming on that gray slab. Early titles like Gameday and Wipeout were amazing. Resident Evil floored me as well when it first game out, cheesy dialogue and all.
I also remember being absolutely absorbed by Kings Field, as difficult as I found it to be to “get into” at first.
And then of course, Symphony of the Night was released and I was in total gaming bliss.
I too never owned it, but I remember when Resident Evil came out, we went over to a friend’s house and watched him play for, like, ten hours straight. Scared the bejeezus out of us. Happy birthday, Gray Slab of Love!
Me and Lew got a Playstation for Christmas in about ’96-’97 with three games. One for me, one for him and one for the two of us. We’d wanted one since our dad’s friend brought his around and showed us Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, I must have been about 12. I got Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Lewis got Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha and we both got Final Fantasy VII.
Thinking about the Playstation has made me realise that I can remember so much of my life through computer games; like some sort of map. I’m sure somebody here said something similar somewhere on Tap…
Anyway, FFVII had such an immense impact on me. It was huge and involving and just so damn epic. I totally lost myself in it. Oddworld was beautiful and very clever. We eventually graduated from Street Fighter EX to the Tekken games. We both got a lot of miles out of Gran Turismo, V-Rally, Wipeout and Ridge Racer Type 4. Then there was the Resident Evil series, Twisted Metal, Vigilante 8, Rogue Trip, Micro Machine V3, The Unholy War, Warhammer: Dark Omen and loads of others. Slowly I lost grip of console gaming as the PC took hold. I never quite got it back.
Mm, happy days. Pirated copy of Future Cop LAPD, acquired by a family friend. Yes, I’m still paranoid about piracy from over a decade ago.
Syndicate Wars..
Silent Hill..
Good times x_x
Playstation 1 will always be an important milestone in gaming history. First console engineered with 3D games in mind I believe. I remember owning my Sega Saturn and thinking, wow, that’s not a bad idea!
Jakkar I could never remember the name of that game. Future Cop LAPD. Me, my brother and our friends played the demo multiplayer so much that when we finally got the game we were bored with it. The same happened with Dead Ball Zone, a crap imitation of Speedball.
While I never owned a PS1 I played an awful lot of Tekken. By played, I mean button mashing while my friend handicapped himself by sitting on his right hand or playing drunk and upside down on the couch or only allowing himself huge combos, no normal attacks. Good times. Later bought PaRappa…to play with an emulator. No way I was going to steal that slice of adorablecake even back in the broke pirate-happy teen years.
Derailing a bit: Speedball! All night sessions the PC port with my roommate in my first apartment. Talk about games as map of life.
Ice cream! Ice cream!
My first encounter with the original PlayStation was with Resident Evil 2 in this little hovel of an apartment with a friend by the name of McShane.
We were 23 or so. Our kitchen–more like a short hallway with a sink–was solely used to amass a fine collection of empty Jack Daniels bottles.
Anyway, the game terrified and engrossed me and introduced me to survival horror. Agh–the bats from the windows, the licker…it was horrible. And awesome.
Silent Hill was another fine game that I bought solely because the box made it look and sound fun. I didn’t know anything about it other than their on-box marketing and it was the first game that made me feel sustained and persistent dread (RE2 had a little, but most of it was jump-scares).
Was that the apartment where your cat kept running away? That kitchen was difficult. Of course, the bottles didn’t help, but back then none of us used our kitchens for anything but storage anyway.
I got it on launch day and had just turned 9. I remember my parents telling me that the bloke in the store told them to get a Sega Saturn, but they got a PlayStation instead. Thank god for that. As a gamer, the PSX is solely responsible for almost everything that has followed for me.
Early highlights were Crash Bandicoot, Tekken and some ESPN racing game where you could race on a skateboard, roller-skates, a bike or a luge. That was fun.
The thing I always remember about the PSX was the more niche classics. There always seemed to be more of them on the PlayStation than I remember on subsequent consoles, although that may be nostalgia talking. Parrapa the Rappa and Vib Ribbon were two of my favourites. Oh, and a game called Spider where you played a spider armed with gun attachments on it’s legs in a lab. Those are game mechanics we need more of..
Man, you guys reminded me of a girlfriend from when I was 19. Her kitchen got so nasty that at one point we just closed the door and never opened it again. I always wondered how she dealt with it when she eventually moved out of there.
Gregg, do you remember when we actually FIRST played FF7? The most alien experience ever, and i’m sure we actually hated it- waiting for “our turn”…
I remember Mick bringing the Playstation round to play on Resident Evil and even in broad daylight everyone was terrified. Scary stuff when your young.
OH and i’ll never forget our riots on Twisted Metal or Unholy War (boy that needs to be remade) absolute classics.
Still, the PC ruined it all… I havn’t owned a console since the Dreamcast!
No, that was the one after. Shoulda let him run away, but McShane found him.
Twisted Metal, proof that cars are for the crashing.
I bought a playstation just to play Shiny’s R/C Stunt Copter. I liked the controls and flight model but the game they built around it disappointed me. I think I never owned more than two or three games for the system. Almost forgot that I actually own a playstation at all.
The first Resident Evil was great too. The zombie dogs bursting out of the windows early in the game was the first time a video game genuinely frightened me.
The complete lack of usable controls actually played a large part in the fear factor. It was like trying to control your body in a dream, and everything is slow and not going the way you want it too.