The Story of the PlayStation 2

the PlayStation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all time having sold over 155 million units worldwide with a life spanning over 13 years this is the story of the Sony PlayStation 2. so to learn about the story of the PlayStation 2 we have to go back to games and context so let's go right back to the start Sony was founded in Japan in 1946 by Missouri Ibaka originally as an electronic shop and produced their own electronic devices such as tape recorders and radios Sony soon realized their growing business needed to go Global and in the 50s entered the US market to big success the company became known for their quality and as such were able to charge higher prices for their products than the norm so we see Sony's first entry into the gaming landscape when they work together with Nintendo for the first time and this was in 1988. this was after employee Ken kataragi went behind Sony's back to agree to produce the sound processor for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System now going behind Sony's back nearly got him fired however those within Sony soon realized the potential of this and they kept him on he's now often referred to as the father of PlayStation at the start of the 90s there was a real desire for bigger games and better graphics this was in the middle of a generation of consoles though and so CD add-ons look like the way to go with rumors of Sega producing their own Sega CD Nintendo didn't want to be left behind and thanks to their partnership already in place with Sony they agreed with Sony that they would make the SNES equivalent of the Sega CD and this would be called the PlayStation as well as this was also arranged that Sony would be able to produce their own sort of games console which would be an all-in-one SNES including both the cartridge slot of the original and a CD add-on all in one package one problem of this arrangement though had already begun as the agreement meant that Sony would hold sole International rights to every game released on the CD add-on this meant they had a relatively large amount of control over Nintendo but by 1991 the agreement was still in place and the PlayStation was set to be announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as it got close to the show though then Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi became increasingly worried about Sony's leverage and pulled the plug on the partnership without consoling Sony so they didn't actually tell Sony and Sony began to hear rumors that Nintendo had gotten cold feet and with only two day is now to go until the announcement of the PlayStation Sony frantically tried calling both Nintendo and Philips but neither answered it's only had to assume that it was just rumors and so two days later at the Consumer Electronics Show the PlayStation was unveiled but at 9am the next day Nintendo officially announced that they had canceled their partnership with Sony and they would be signing with their biggest Rivals Phillips those in the industry call it the greatest ever betrayal now despite this Sony we're actually still open to working with Nintendo and still wanted to make the PlayStation so it was agreed that the PlayStation would keep an SNES port and Nintendo would hold the rights and retain most of the profits development was deep enough that roughly 200 prototypes were made one of which actually sold at auction for over 300 000 recently but this agreement angered many within Sony as Nintendo had stab them in the back and a deal between the two could jeopardize Sony especially with the power that Nintendo had in the deal so in 1992 Sony decided to cut all ties with Nintendo and after previously being laughed out the door by Sega for the Sega CD add-on Sony only had no ties within the video game industry and it looked likely that this would be the end of their video game involvement however the man who got this all started Ken kataragi was adamant that Sony should continue and after reminding the board of the humiliation they faced from Nintendo the company began working on their own Standalone console in 1993 just a year after the cut from Nintendo Sony announced to the world their plans and in 1994 the PlayStation was released in Japan it competed against the Sega Saturn which released a week earlier and thanks to Virtua Fighter the Saturn was able to get off to a better start but the PlayStation was selling better than imagined especially considering the install base which Sega had at the time in 1995 the PlayStation was released in North America at 299 a hundred dollars cheaper than the Saturn despite the Good Start in Japan a Sega were scared and so I decided to preemptively release the Saturn in North America but this was with little warning and so many stores weren't ready and as such the release flopped four months later the PlayStation released in North America and sold more units in two days than the sat and did in five months it was clear Sony were here to stay now you're probably wondering where Nintendo are in all of this well they didn't release their next Generation console the Nintendo 64 until late 1996 and as such the PlayStation had already established a large install base a vast games library and were established in the industry even when the N64 released a PlayStation sales continued to grow it all meant that the PlayStation won the fifth generation and by a landslide it sold of 102 million units compared to 32 million of the N64 and just 9 million of the Saturn but how would they follow up well now we're on to the story of the PlayStation 2.

work reportedly began on the PS2 as early as 1994 with the launch of the PlayStation it was by 1997 that the Press began reporting that Sony were working on a second PlayStation which would include backwards compatibility a DVD drive and internet capability Sony denied this to depress but it was clear that something was coming soon Chris Dearing then president of scee said that those within Sony were anxious about a follow-up to the PlayStation known it would be incredibly tough to replicate its success at the same time though Sega were becoming desperate after the flop of the Saturn Financial pressure was high and they needed their next console to succeed as early as 1995 development began on their new console and by 1997 the company began leaking information about their new console and games in an attempt to raise hype levels Sega were pouring everything out of this and spent up to 80 million dollars on Hardware development and 300 million dollars on promotion the Dramcast was officially unveiled in May 1998. being the first of the Next Generation the Dramcast Drw significant attention and received a lot of pre-orders but from this problems began due to chip failure many divisively faulty and Sega stocked pre-orders the Dramcast did release as planned in Japan however it failed to capitalize on the high interest due to the shortage of stock as well as that Sonic Adventure and Sega Rally Championship 2 which was supposed to launch with the console with the laid meaning only Virtual Fighter 3 was hyped at launch then before the North American launch sagor hit with another blowers Ian announced they wouldn't be supporting assist this was due to Sega flip along around with the hardware making it hard for the developers to work on and this meant that instead of popular EA Sports Games the Dramcast had well Sega sports games despite this in September 1999 the system launched a commercial success it set sales records but despite this Sony still maintained 60 market share through the PlayStation's install base and just 11 days after North American release at the Tokyo game show Sony unveiled the PlayStation 2. foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] revealed that the PS2 would be able to render up to 16 million polygons per second and this was compared to the Dramcast ability to render 6 million per second Sony also confirmed the PS2 would be using DVDs which could hold far more data than a Dramcast gd-rom system this also enabled backwards compatibility with the PlayStation meaning the install base they'd already worked so hard for wouldn't lose out it also meant it was only the second Mainline console ever to feature true backwards compatibility after the Atari 7800 to many it looked like the Dramcast was going to be obsolete just months after it was released and hyped for the PS2 was huge and in March 2000 the console launched in Japan sales records were absolutely smashed with the PlayStation pulling in 250 million dollars on the first day beating the 97 million dollar record made on the first day of the Dramcast it was released in October in North America and November in Europe and was met with just as much hype the releases weren't playing sailing however just like the Dramcast the PlayStation 2 was affected by shortages due to manufacturing delays and many predicted this would help say because people return to the Dramcast which had just received a price dropped to 149 compared to the 299 of the PS2 however this wasn't to be as most decided just to wait or instead purchase a new Slimmer PS1 which became the best-selling console that Christmas the PS2 was gradually more and more in stock and became arguably the most hyped product on the planet they did something no other console had ever done before reach all markets with games for the casual and hardcore all Gamers were catered For and the added media functionality through the included DVD player made non-gamers even interested this was because Standalone DVD players at the time were often more expensive than the PS2 the system continued to fly off shelves while Sega struggled massively and in March 2001 Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dramcast and pulled out of the video game console race this meant that until late 2001 the PS2 was the only real option on the market and it's install base grew massively over this time but then the PS2 faced its biggest battle yet with the releases of the Nintendo GameCube and the original Xbox many predicted that it would be a close three-way battle with the Xbox significantly more powerful than the PS2 and having Halo whilst the game key was the cheapest console and had the low of exclusives such as Mario and Zelda but that DVD functionality turned out to be key the GameCube had no ability to play DVDs and the Xbox required an external adapter and so neither of those two consoles really appealed to the consumer Market it's only we're still worried though and lowered the price of the PS2 to 199 and secured the exclusive rights of the Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid series another thing that sprang up around this time was online gaming and the Xbox launched with heavy focus on it something the PS2 hadn't and once again PlayStation tried to combat this by introducing the PlayStation network adapter in 2002 and from then on more of a focus on online gaming despite the launch of the game give you an Xbox the PlayStation 2 was still number one and in 2002 the PlayStation 2 sold 25 million units this is more than the Xbox or GameCube did in their entire lifespans the PlayStation to continue to grow and in 2003 he saw the release of the itoy this was a webcam for the PS2 which was used for games where you could use gestures to control and this meant the good sales of the system continued with 20 million sold in 2003 2004 came along and Sony launched the PS2 Slim in midst of rumors of the Next Generation especially regarding Xbox 360.

however despite the release of the PS2 slim these rumors along with manufacturing issues meant that sales fell to just 11 million in 2004 but this was resolved in the next year as sales went back up to 20 million in 2005. this was the year the Xbox 360 launched from around 2004 2005-ish though focused within Sony did shift away from the PS2 now towards the PSP and the PS3 but the PS2 remained popular even after the launch of the Next Generation even throughout the PS3 Xbox 360 era the PS2 sold well especially in less well-off countries and it continued to receive support until it was officially discontinued in January 2013 the year the PS4 was released the last game to be released for the system was FIFA 14 which was released on the PS2 PS3 and PS4 spanning three generations in total the PS2 sold 155 million units making the most successful game console of all time so now the story is told let's have a look at the consoles the reiterations the accessories and of course the games so if we start off with the consoles first of all we have the original fat PS2 the standard color was of course the classic matte black with the PS2 logo in blue but there were loads more colors available of this massive fat PS2 and I'll list them off now so we had ceramic white light yellow metallic blue metallic silver Navy opaque blue opaque black pearl white Sakura purple satin gold satin silver Snow White super red transparent blue and also a limited edition pink the console had two controller ports which actually criticized a little bit at the time especially when the Dramcast had four and it had two memory card slots my favorite part growing up was always the PlayStation logo which you could move depending on which orientation you had it but overall the fat PlayStation 2 very solid but then we have the slim PS2 released in 2004 and this was so much smaller than the original honestly it's incredible how they managed to get it that much smaller in only four years the disk drive was a flapper top thing so not as nice as the emoted slot loading Bay this is kind of like the Wii Mini compared to the Wii it featured in the inbuilt ethernet port which is obviously good for the growing online gaming at the time and unlike the original didn't have an external power supply so in all aspects it was really an upgrade so there were only actually two reiterations of the PlayStation 2 which you might have expected there to be a third um considering you know many consoles have three iterations that's if we only include the mainline systems though there were two other quite special models first of all the PSX which was released exclusively in Japan in December 2003 this was a digital video recorder and DVD burner in addition to being a PS2 it didn't sell well at all in Japan and was not released anywhere else and then we have the PlayStation 2 TV officially the Sony Bravia kdl22px 300 it was released in Europe in 2010 22 inch 720p TV and like how many TVs had DVD drives this had a PS2 console inside of it but now let's move on to the controller the original DualShock was released for the PS1 in 1997 and differed from the standard PS1 controller as it featured vibration feedback and analog sticks and Sony stuck with these with the dual shock too the controller is pretty much identical to the DualShock one and thanks to backwards compatibility well they all use the same port you could use all PlayStation 1 controllers on the PlayStation 2. there were a couple of differences though all the buttons now were pressure sensitive which was obviously great for racing games especially with the triggers so overall the DualShock 2 was a great controller so much so the design has pretty much stayed the same in the the whole way through PlayStation's lifespan but now let's have a look at some of the accessories and there were a lot especially third-party knocker fonts you know thinking new companies like mad cats a few official ones though included the previously mentioned itoy the buzz buzzer a DVD remote and a Logitech wireless controller there were loads of other ones though such as dance mats microphones and of course steering wheels but now arguably the most important part of any games console the games as far as I'm aware the PlayStation 2 has the biggest catalog of games of any console with over 4 000 titles being released and a staggering 1.