With the PlayStation 4 unveil just days away, Sony is taking the opportunity to help buld hype by giving everyone a history lesson that covers everything that came before.
Two parts have been published thus far on YouTube. The first recounts Sony's first entry real foray into the home video game market, via the PlayStation 1, and how they were successful right from the get go:
The above is sure to bring back plenty of memories for those of us in our 30s, back when the 32/64-bit wars accentuated our high school and college daze.
Sony was indeed an aggressive new player that, to a certain degree, helped to "mature" video games, by making it more of a lifestyle brand for young adults, as opposed to a video game machine, which was the stuff of kids.
Unfortunately, the history is far from complete. Then again, it's perhaps a bit foolish to think that Sony would bring up the fact that the reason why they even considered getting involved in the video game biz in the first place: the Game Boy.
As the story goes, a Sony exec was livid over the machine’s success, let alone its existence, since it should have been a Sony product, or so he felt (since they did mostly dominate the portable electronic landscape, via the Walkman).
Nor is it mentioned how Sony was going to attempt to backdoor their way into video games, by producing the CD-ROM add on for the SNES (which was dubbed the Play Station).
But when Nintendo realized that, due to how the contracts were laid out, Sony could legal make their own SNES hardware and cut the house that Mario built out of some serious revenue, the deal was broken at the very last minute.
Then again, that's all dirty laundry involving third parties that is perhaps neither here nor there. Though speaking of third parties, Sony's decision to concentrate on the PSone's first party offerings alone is curious.
After all, much of its success was due to high profile releases like Final Fantasy 7 (which was one a Nintendo-only property) and Metal Gear Solid.
Moving on is part who, which not surprisingly, covers the PlayStation 2:
At least the second clip shows a bit of Final Fantasy, part ten to be exact, even if third parties games are again not mentioned by name. It's also a nice reminder that Sony did Kinect well before the Xbox 360 entered the picture.
