THE PATH TO PS5

It’s taken us over a quarter of a century to reach this point. Look back with us over PlayStation’s history

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PLAYSTATION

With a tear in our eye we look back on where it all began

As we put it in 1995, it was “the biggest hardware launch of the decade.” Having looked on as Japan and the US got to try PlayStation ahead of us here in the UK, we confidently said this was “Sony’s biggest launch since the Walkman, [and] puts PlayStation in prime position to be the nextgeneration machine.”

It wasn’t easy for Sony – by the end of 1994 Sega Saturn had outsold PlayStation by 200,000 units – but with US and European launches planned for 1995 Sony began to market its console to a new, older, cooler customer. At the first E3 in LA on 11 May 1995, Olaf Olafsson, the head of Sony Computer Entertainment America, revealed PlayStation would cost $299, undercutting Saturn by $100. Sony then revealed its killer lineup of Ridge Racer, Tekken, and WipEout. Forgoing cartridges for CDs, PlayStation meant more out of the box; mainstream media, fashion, music, and film magazines devoted column inches to the console. It was the kind of cultural shift that Sony continues to play on today.