Happy Birthday, Playstation

The first week of December saw the 15th anniversary of the release of the original Playstation (in Japan, anyway). The cynic in me (who is, essentially, me) thinks that the coverage that this milestone received was thanks to overactive marketing executives taking a break from the coke to try to drum up some Playstation column inches.  "Hmm" think the readers of the marketing-generated copy "Sony Playstation. I had one of those back in the 'day'. I wonder what Sony are doing now? Number three you say? What does that do?".

So, showing that I'm a sucker for a good manufactured news item as much as the next man (which is why I always steer clear of the Daily  Express), here's my Playstation personal retrospective. Actually the 'next man' is sat on the train seat next to me as I hammer this out on my Blogpress iPhone App,  reading the Financial Times with a serious look on his face. I doubt he would be suckered by the marketeers. He'd probably scoff at it and want to know Sony's financial results. Killjoy.  Anyway.......

I first played the Playstation in early 1996, when a friend brought his sparkly new console to my student house before a West Ham game (I lived within walking distance of the Boleyn Ground) and we marvelled at FIFA 1996 ("wow, the commentary uses player names - that's creative midfielder Ian Bishop!" and Destruction Derby. Neither have aged well (particularly FIFA 1996, which wasn't even that good - 3D sheen and commentary aside - at the time) but I could see the potential. 


The clincher that this was something special, for me, came with Resident Evil. Another friend had bought one  and I went over to his flat,  had a go and my mind was well and truly blown. I'd heard from friends before that this was a scary game and scoffed at them - as if a game could scare you!  And then the dogs jumped through the window. And then the second set of dogs jumped through the next window.  Actually, I thought (screamed) a game could  scare you. We played the game between us that night, switching the joypad  every so often, until 5am in the morning (I had to get up for work at 7am). One of my most memorable gaming experiences ever.

Soon after, I persuaded my older brother, with whom I was living at the time, to buy one. They were still about ￡200-￡250 then I think and you'd need another pad and a memory card before you even thought about buying games - all well outside of my budget back then. By some silver-tongued trick of mine, I managed to persuade him, with faultless logic, that the best place to situate the console was, actually, in my room (placed, for reasons I can't quite remember, on an upturned washing up bowl).

I finally got my own machine in late 1997 (there was a price drop to ￡125) and gave my brother his one back (he seemed grateful enough).  That grey wonder still works today (though you have to balance it on its side these days). Will my 360 or my PS3 still be on this side of the veil in 2021 (the year, not 8:21 this evening, though I see your point)? I'm on my second 360 (I know others have had far more than that) and - touch wood - no problems so far but I can't see it still running Bioshock two decades on. My Wii will probably survive though - the reason soldiers have insufficient body armour in Afghanistan is that Nintendo make their consoles out of the stuff.

Other fan-led retrospectives, particularly Game Central's Inbox feature last weekend, have, in the main, praised the  machine and its effect on the gaming landscape (a landscape that would have suffered from 'pop-up', I'm sure). The thing is, I remember in the mid-nineties that Sony were on the wrong end of the kind of  pelters from hardcore gamers that the Wii gets these days. Earnest letters were written to Edge (are there any other kind?) about how Sony was destroying gaming with their 'cool' console, pandering to clubbers, getting on the cover of trendy non-gaming magazines, abstract TV ads ('I have conquered worlds', anyone?) and generally appealing to the mainstream. Mom & Pop concerns like Sega & Nintendo, the fanboys said, who actually cared about gaming (so not profit, then) were being kicked to the kerb by this upstart and gaming was doomed.

I thought this was cobblers at the time and still do. Some of my favourite games of all time were on the Playstation - Vagrant Story, Vandal Hearts, FFVII, Resident Evil 2 - and it was home to a broad church of different types of game (certainly more so than any of the current gen consoles are).  I think it was because Sega/Nintendo fanboys were so set in their own little two-sided confrontational universe (like the CIA when the Soviet Union was more than just a fashion motif) that any attempt to muscle in on that was bound to short-out their minds.  Coupled with the fact that change is never welcomed by some quarters.



The thing is, a lot of the core gamers that are around now cut their teeth on the Playstation - without it, gaming may well have died, or at least not been the multi-billion dollar industry it is now.  I'm sure there are those that would think that this would have been a good thing but then I'm sure there were cavemen that thought 'fire' was an advance that they could do without and that mammoth tasted quite OK raw, thanks very much.  Personally, here's to cooked games.

Casual gamers into core gamers

There's a theory that the 'new gamers' that Nintendo are bringing to the gaming market, those consumers that had never gamed before Dr Kawashima or Wii Sports, can be weaned onto 'proper' games. That if they knew about Zelda or Advance Wars they would cast aside their Sudoku and Rabbids. David Jenkins, editor of Gamecentral on Teletext, said as much on an edition of the much-missed Games Night on the slightly-missed xleague.tv satellite channel.

I've only got anecdotal evidence to the contrary but this is my experience. My mother-in-law received a DS for Christmas last year from her dog (don't ask). She's in her sixties and, to my knowledge, had never gamed prior to having a go on my daughter's DS a few months before her dog's purchase. Along with her DS she also received two games (from the dog, her budgie or her husband), Dr Kawashima's Brain Training and Sight Training and has avidly played them both since Christmas.

Over the summer, I decided to put the theory that these types of games can lead less experienced gamers towards 'proper' games. I own - and love - Professor Layton and the Curious Village and I thought that this would be a good choice of 'proper' game to lend to my mother-in-law, as it has the trappings of a real game but is essentially a series of unconnected logic problems. I knew that my mother-in-law liked sudoku puzzles and similar, so Layton seemed a good fit for her potential gaming habits (and a cracking game to boot).

The next time I saw her, she cursed me (not literally - she's not a witch or anything) for giving her Layton, as she could not get on with it at all. The 'gamey-ness' of Layton's story and structure meant that she could not enjoy, or even get to, the kernel of the game, the puzzles. If you didn't have to traipse around a village chatting to weirdoes to get your puzzles but instead the game just lined up ten puzzles a day and was called Dr Layton's Puzzle Training I truly think she would have lapped it up.

I'm not going to try to extrapolate this experience across the whole of gaming but I think that the sales figures for traditional games compared to the new gaming experiences typified by Brain Training tell their own tale. Whether Nintendo's market strategy this generation will backfire next generation when those non-gamers they targeted this time around do not see the need to upgrade to improve their gaming experiences (casual games hardly tax the hardware) only time will tell.

And my mother-in-law? She's just bought a Wii....