How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)

>Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?

Difficult to ascertain. Sales wise of course Sony will sell more. It was N64's 388 worldwide games vs Sony's 4,074 titles. More games than you could possibly try + Lower prices + higher install base will lead to more game sales and frankly I have seen so many more "experimental" titles on Playstation.

Never thought i'd be playing as a beach ball escaping a maze while eating watermelons and listening to egyptian trance but it happened on Playstation.

https://youtu.be/OcaNdzEXch8?t=7

Plus Sony always felt like a "global" console. They expanded the user base to not only non gamers but a truly international audience (latin america, middle east etc.) It was probably the modchips that made it happen but still.

But "winning the console war" is more than just raw sales. For example, of that extremely small 388 titles it is astounding how many of those games have won numerous prestigious awards, were genre defining, moved its genre in a direction that all others copied, or are still cited as one of the best games of all time.

The N64 really laid down an entire historial footprint for the millennial generation despite its significantly smaller sales. I guess a lot of that is down to Nintendo and many of their games demonstrating why they have been in a league of their own. But the console also had superb titles released by third parties as well.

I used to work for a Sony retailer in Scotland when the PS2 was launched, and we were all incredibly annoyed they wouldn't give us one to demo.

"But you sell TVs, DVD players, and audio systems, not games consoles, you won't sell any of these"

Well not if we can't demo it we won't!

Despite this being the prevailing attitude at Sony - "don't sell them in shops where people are already spending five figure sums on home entertainment" - it did really well.

The one thing where I think they really missed a trick though, was their 200-disc changers. They had a CD changer and a DVD changer, massive units (we had a DVP-CX850D on demo), that took 200 discs like the name suggests, plugged into your TV and audio system, and you could select which one you wanted to play from an on-screen menu.

I think they really biffed it by not offering that chassis with PS2 guts. Just think, you've got your library of films, audio CDs, and games, all in one unit tucked neatly out of the way. It would have been expensive but it would have blown the market apart.

And, like the CX850, it'd still be about 700 quid on eBay 27 years later.

you can observe Microsoft Gaming fall apart over the next 12 month.

Can you imagine what it was like to work on the PS2? Everyone knew it was going to be huge and it was so hard to get the dev kit. I remember I had to fly somewhere with my prototype game and my development PS2 hardware. That was not long after "911" and TSA was very strict. They were like: what the hell is weird piece of electronics. Those were very exciting times.

Correction: The illustration in the article labeled "Sony’s original Playstation" does not show the original playstation controller.

For comparison purposes that is shown in the following image:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#/media/F...