As many of you know, December 3rd marked the 20th anniversary of the PlayStation brand since the original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994 (it wouldnt make it to the US for another 10 months). So I decided to express the PlayStation love/hate relationship Ive had over the past 20 years. First, growing up with both the Nintendo and Sega brands, I first saw PlayStation as an intrusion. I remember seeing commercials like this: https://youtube/watch?v=iX7M8a3S9cM I thought to myself that Sony and their partners were conning people into buying these games by showing all this (then) impressive FMV footage and no actual gameplay and that these games were probably very shallow. Years later, I was partially right. I feel like most Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 games aged much better than the original PlayStation games, although the PS1 did have its share of wonderful classics that are still fun to play. It used to kill me that the PS1 did as well as it did while Sega or Nintendo could do nothing to stop it. PlayStation 2 came around in 2000. Again, I felt frustration. Sega was financially ailing, but their Dreamcast system had the superior games. There was no reason why anyone should pick up a PS2 with their mediocre launch titles when Dreamcast was already cheaper and had some of the best games one could imagine at the time. Well, backward compatibility with the original PlayStation and DVD playback functionality would prove me wrong. After that, I had matured. By this point, I started playing some of the PS1 classics I missed out on and finally got a PS2 when I was 18. While the launch games may have been bad, within a year the PS2 would have some of the most impressive games ever seen and would become one of my favorite game systems. Unlike the first system, the developers have mastered 3D gameplay and created more lasting games. So by the time the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 arrived in 2005 and 2006, Sony started making one mistake after another and had screwed up. I didnt cheer like I would have in my preteen and early teen years. I instead felt sad. I was also angry at Sony for screwing up and letting Microsofts Xbox 360 get the better of of them. The PS3 would get better, although it didnt hold a candle to there PS2 while PSP would be.....okay. Something else happened during these years. I went to college and in these art courses, aside from learning about drawing, painting, sculpting, photography, and graphics design, I also learned about the art of marketing. Thats when it hit me. While I didnt agree with the deception of the first PS1 commercials or the way Sony was able to pass off the PS2 as an entertainment device in its first year and was able to sell the thing without having any good games for it, I realized it was brilliant marketing. In fact, it was genius. I then realized that Sony wasnt even the first to do this. Years before PlayStation, Sega did the same thing when their Genesis was competing with Nintendos Super Nintendo and like the PlayStation ads a few years later, it was marketing genius even though the message was mostly bullshit. When I looked back on the history that was just being written when I was a kid, I realized that Sony won in those early days not just because the things they did right, but because of what the competition did wrong. In the mid 90s, both Nintendo and Sega created the N64 and Sega Saturn to be sophisticated and complicated for developers to make games for while the original PlayStation was easy by comparison. Nintendo in particular made the mistake of not adopting the CD format and instead sticking with the cartridge format which meant that those fancy FMV cinematic that became a huge selling point for PlayStation games couldnt fit on an N64 cartridge and would give the impression of it being a weaker system, even though the opposite held true. A few years later, Segas Dreamcast did have all the wonderful games and the marketing to back it up, but Sega had nearly bankrupted themselves with the Saturn and could never compete with Sony on a financial level. In fact, they possibly could have had more of an advantage if they had DVD playback in the Dreamcast, but they were so broke by that point that the DVD technology at the time was financially out of their league, I learned how having competition only makes the other guys do better. It should be no coincidence that the PS3 dramatically improved only after Nintendo had their big comeback with the Wii. Now, being nearly 30 years old and through living with all this history, I could care less about who wins or who loses anymore. While Sega has fallen from grace, Nintendo and Sony are still making Nintendo and PlayStation products. Sony wins one generation, Nintendo wins another, then the game starts all over again. Instead of cheering for one or the other, I would prefer if they just tried as hard as possible to kick each others asses. That way, no matter who wins, everybody wins.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 12:42:24 +0000
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