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Anyway, it goes a little something like this...
Back in the early 90's gaming was for kids, and geeks. Gaming was something that wasn't seen as being an acceptable hobby by most of the older population, and gamers would be ridiculed for there preference of video football to the real thing.
Until Sony came along in the mid-90's with their Playstation, that apparently brought gaming to the masses, made it more socially acceptable, and created the 'casual gamer'.
But is the legend actually true?
It seems to me that Sony were just in the right place at the right time.
Arcades really started in the 70's, with the home consoles coming coming towards the end of the decade, with the Atari 2600 being vastly popular in the late 70's and early 80's.
Now if you had an Atari 2600 when you were young, say between 5 and 10, then when the Playstation was released in the UK in 1995, you would have been in your late teens or early twenties.
If your gaming history begins with the NES, again, you would have been in your teens by the time that the Playstation was released.
And early Playstation games such as Tekken and WipEout were sure to appeal to gamers that may have felt that they had outgrown gaming on the Nintendo or Sega consoles, had outgrown Sonic and Mario.
The games available on the Playstation were not the games that would necessarily appeal to those that were happy with their Sega's or Nintendo's but those that wanted something different from the trademark characters, and childish games.
But weren't there these kind of games available on the existing systems?
Splatterhouse had been in the arcades for several years. A game in which a chunky guy wearing a hockey mask attacked various beats with a meat cleaver, in a scrolling platformer. This game was available on the Megadrive.
Mortal Kombat, and it's sequel had both been released, into the arcades, and onto the Megadrive and SNES.
So there was no shortage of these more mature titles, that apparently the PSX made popular.
And the thought that Sony made gaming more popular?
Sales figures for consoles and games had been rising for years, it was just a case of the Playstation release coinciding with this, rather than being a cause of this.
So why is it generally thought that Sony is responsible for these things?
Well with the 'more mature' titles thing, it was something that Sony wanted to be noted for. The console did not want to be comparitable to the SNES, or the Saturn, or the soon to be released N64, so it made a point of it's more mature titles. Nintendo wanted to keep a clean, family console image, so it's Donkey Kong games were more noted that the Killer Instinct ones.
What the Playstation did do, however, was offer the developer a better deal, so the console had tremendous support, and a huge amount of games released fr it.
So yes, in one respect Sony did revolutionise gaming. Developers have gotten a beeter deal from console games ever since the playstation came along, but the popularity of the industry was not down to the Playstation, but down to gamers growing up, and having more disposable income, and more adult titles being released was again down to gamers growing up, and wanting something more that cuddly bunnies on fluffy pink clouds! But hey, what's wrong with cuddly bunnies?
In fact, that makes me think, how the hell did Wave Race look so good. Some of the waves in Dreamcast water sport games looks awful in compsarison.
PSX's biggest thing at launch was its graphics, not to mention the massive lineup of games in the making which was widely publicised.
They brought mature titles sure, but its biggest thing was FMV, which had only really been dreamt of on the Mega-CD and partially attempted on the Saturn.
Sony, from a technological viewpoint, got it bang on with the PSX, which was why it sold in droves at launch. Plus the fact that it did bring gaming to a new level in that you got more involved with games, you didn't just 'play' them anymore, you got 'into' them, something that before was only achieved by getting mesmerised by Tetris or hypnotised by Space Invaders.
Now you actually got 'emotionally' involved with your games, which is what made the PSX so special.
the playstation was the first console to give CD sondtracks (excluding the £400 saturn) but i don't think it was the first console to make gaming "cool" it just made it alot better.