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HTML How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
RunSet wrote 1 day ago:
Correction: The illustration in the article labeled "Sonyâs original
Playstation" does not show the original playstation controller.
For comparison purposes that is shown in the following image:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#/media/Fil...
brainzap wrote 1 day ago:
you can observe Microsoft Gaming fall apart over the next 12 month.
sylens wrote 1 day ago:
What a great trip to the past this was. I'm sure this is the rose
colored glasses talking, but I do miss how video games weren't quite so
mainstream in the 90s and early 2000's. Launches were smaller but felt
like much bigger deals. There wasn't wall to wall coverage of every
game all the time, so you could still easily be surprised by one that
you had bought.
georgeecollins wrote 1 day ago:
I love this essay for how it captures point in time.
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ginko wrote 1 day ago:
>In the end, the console wars of the late 1990s were won by Nintendo,
which built on the momentum of the Nintendo 64 by launching the
GameCube in 2001, along with an arsenal of handheld systems
Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't
completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?
>The limited amount of storage on the cartridge means that the textures
laid over the gameâs polygons are blurry and often hideously ugly.
The cartridge storage wasn't the limiting factor here. The problem was
the unified RDRAM memory architecture of the N64 which turned out to be
too slow for texturing. Instead developers had to use a 4KiB bit of
onboard memory which was just too little in hindsight.
chocochunks wrote 1 day ago:
I think it was just a joke based on that store's sales where N64 was
dominating at the time...
nebula8804 wrote 1 day ago:
>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. [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/OcaNdzEXch8?t=7
ErneX wrote 1 day ago:
Iâll never forget the PS2 US launch. I visited the US for holidays
and landed just the day before launch. I thought I was going to be able
to get one unit the next day if I asked in a few shops if they knew
they were going to have stock. After my sister took me to a few it was
clear it was going to be next to impossible, some were going to get as
few as a dozen of them and those were already reserved.
But in the last Best Buy we visited the person I asked about the launch
told me the same as all the other stores we visited before but said
âyou really want one?â And he pulled out his wallet and started
digging into a bunch of papers and gave me a receipt of his own PS2
reservation at another chain (I think it was Electronics Boutique?) and
said âkeep it, I donât feel like getting it now Iâll just get one
down the roadâ, he didnât want any money for it, we insisted
profusely, even though his reservation had like 15 dollars already
paid. I was so lucky.
That other store was doing a midnight launch, they even had police in
the parking lot keeping an eye. Picked up the console with Ridge Racer
V, Tekken Tag Tournament, Kessen and a 2nd controller if I recall
correctly.
Good times.
georgeecollins wrote 1 day ago:
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.
heraldgeezer wrote 1 day ago:
I mean the PS2 was a bigger hit than the PS1 and anything Nintendo put
out so that analysis wains.
The jump in graphics was massive.
lee_ars wrote 3 days ago:
Good times, they were. Good times indeed. (And we're still married,
too!)
MobileVet wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for this⦠great trip down memory lane. I also worked at
Babbages during the 1993 academic year. I probably spent my whole
paycheck there! I definitely considered myself lucky, I didnât
find a wife but it sure beat McDonaldâs!
blargthorwars wrote 4 days ago:
I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see
through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year
during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress,
just better iteration.
sylens wrote 1 day ago:
I sometimes wonder how many people got convinced to go into tech
after playing a game like Mario 64 as a kid.
ecshafer wrote 4 days ago:
I am a bit younger but I agree. Going from the SNES/Genesis to
Playstation/N64 with 3d graphics was amazing. It was like having an
arcade machine at home. Going to the PS2/Xbox and then 360/PS3 was
again a massive jump. Every console jump was a very noticeable
improvement in graphics, so it became a big deal. PS4/PS5/XBONE these
were just such minor improvements, there is no big wow factor.
pipes wrote 4 days ago:
The snes to N64 jump to me is definitely the biggest. It wasn't
just graphics, the gameplay completely changed too.
By the end of the snes era I had grown out of games due to endless
platforms and 2d fighters (I was 13ish). I was 16 by time I started
playing them again. Wave race 64 was just mind blowing. And like
nothing else I'd played before.
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