The PlayStation is 25 years old

On December 3, 1994, twenty-five years ago today, the Japanese multinational Sony put the first PlayStation version on sale in Japan, one of the best-selling consoles ever and later celebrated as the one that forever changed the world of video games. Over the years three other versions have come out – and a much awaited fifth will be released at the end of 2020 – but according to experts, the most iconic remains the first, which was marketed in the rest of the world at the end of 1995.

The PlayStation was actually very different from all the consoles that came out in previous years, with the exception of the Sega Saturn (launched a couple of weeks before, but definitely more expensive and a less powerful thread). It was also a choice of necessity: in the previous six years Sony had collaborated with Nintendo – which then dominated the video game market thanks to the NES and Game Boy consoles – to produce a new console that would read both the classic "cartridges", which contained the games produced by Nintendo, both CD-ROMs, a new format in which Sony was specializing.

The collaboration was interrupted in 1993, it seems by the will of the historic Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, and even today the former Sony executives say that at the time "we went to bed with tears in our eyes". Despite having no experience in the video game market, Sony decided to use some technologies made for Nintendo to produce a new console on its own. Unable to offer the popular Nintendo branded games, such as the Super Mario saga, he relied on external production companies to develop the first games of the new console. He also bet on the format of CD-ROMs, potentially more fragile than cartridges but also cheaper to produce and capable of hosting more data.

Both decisions proved to be successful. "The spaciousness of the CD-ROMs and the 32-bit processor (twice the NES, ed) attracted video game designers in a world where, suddenly, three-dimensional graphics were at hand," recalls the online magazine The National.

The three-dimensional graphics were in fact one of the first things that distinguished the PlayStation from all the other consoles, and that filled "the gap that still existed between the videogames available in the boxes of arcades and those available on computers", he wrote Time few years ago. Many remember the exceptional graphics of Ridge Racer, the first car racing video game developed for PlayStation, in some ways very similar to those that are played today (many of which are inspired by Gran Turismo, a series of hugely successful video games released exclusively for PlayStation).

The powerful processor developed by Sony and the mountain of data that could contain the CD-ROMs not only made possible a general improvement of the graphics, but also a depth until then unknown for a video game: also for this reason Final Fantasy VII, the first title of the well-known role-playing video game to come out for PlayStation, is still celebrated today as the most popular of the saga. Even video games that came out simultaneously for other consoles, such as tomb Raider is Resident Evil, played on PlayStation were able to guarantee a smoother and generally better gaming experience. In the years following the launch, and due to the avalanche, hundreds of video games were released for PlayStation compared to the few dozen available for other consoles.

Another far-sighted decision was to completely change the joystick and make it decidedly more ergonomic and suitable for two-handed operation: up until then, everyone had imitated the single-block joysticks of the NES. Still today, he points out The Verge, the shape of the joysticks for any console closely resembles those of the first PlayStation.

It is estimated that during the 12 years in which it remained on sale, from 1994 to 2006, 104.25 million PlayStations were sold. Even today it remains the best-selling TV console ever after PlayStation 2, which sold 157.68 million devices from 2000 to 2013.

None of the consoles that were released in the following years reached the success of the first two PlayStation. Only the Wii from Nintendo, who stopped at 101 million, and the XboX 360 from Microsoft, which reached 85, went close to us. The console that Nintendo put on the market in 1996 to try to counter the success of the PlayStation – the Nintendo 64 – he sold more or less one third of the first PlayStation, despite having incorporated several technological innovations from the rival console including three-dimensional graphics and an ergonomic joystick.