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The PlayStation changed everything in 1995. Imagine if it never happened.
by Levi Buchanan

There is no diminishing the impact of Sony's entry into the videogame market in 1995 with the launch of the original PlayStation. At this point, the landscape was defined by Nintendo and SEGA and had been since 1985. For a straight decade, the titanic two butted heads and swapped marketing slogans for the attention of a sizable but limited audience of gamers. Sony saw something bigger than that. It saw videogames not as a niche form of entertainment, but as a mainstream pillar of pop culture alongside movies. With the worldwide dominance of the PlayStation 2, launched in 2000, Sony delivered on its vision. And in 2006, Sony went for a three-peat with the PlayStation 3. That console's success is still up in the air, not helped at all by the current economic turmoil, but for its fans, it is a wonderful machine that plays stellar games like Killzone 2 and gorgeous high-def movies like "Casino Royale."

Now, imagine what the industry would look like without any of that. No PlayStation disrupting the market in 1995. Sony instead sits it out and concerned itself more on its audio and video technology, like televisions and portable music players. How would our videogames look and play without Sony's pivotal entry in the market?

This is not just a speculation piece for amusement. Retrogamers that bemoan the co-called intrusion of Sony into videogames need to understand just what exactly Sony's entry has meant to not only the industry, but also to the very games you're playing right now.

The Alternate 1995

In 1995, the videogame industry wasn't necessarily in the greatest shape. The Super NES was still doing very well on the back of evergreen titles like the Super Mario games and the Donkey Kong Country franchise, but the Nintendo 64 was still in the distance. SEGA, on the other hand, wasn't doing so hot. The Genesis was being actively pushed into the sunset, and it was a pretty ugly one thanks to the 32X and SEGA CD misfires. The surprise Saturn launch was botched and botched badly. Retailers were angry with limited quantities. Developers were caught with their pants down. And gamers that weren't priced out of the scene by the Saturn's $399 sticker were irritated that the system library was anemic.

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This machine changed the course of videogames.

Without the PlayStation, SEGA might not have made the sorry choice to launch early. Holding out for September as it originally promised would have ensured a larger launch library, better games (imagine if Daytona USA had a couple more months in the hopper), and a wider release that did not infuriate shafted retailers. SEGA's fortunes would have benefited greatly if the threat of the PlayStation had not forced its hand. Sounds good, right?

Well, the Dreamcast was a response to the bad calls with the Saturn. The Saturn was not exactly a strong piece of hardware. Many developers struggled with coding. It seemed only SEGA had it down, and even then, it took SEGA until Virtua Fighter 2 to really turn on the magic. If gamers had no option to the Saturn, would SEGA have worked as hard as it did to create the easily programmable Dreamcast? Competition breeds excellence amongst smart rivals, and SEGA needed that kick in the teeth from Sony to craft good hardware like the Dreamcast.

As for Nintendo at the time, the Nintendo 64 itself was pretty much in motion in 1995. Nintendo's plans for the N64 arguably were not affected by the PlayStation because, well, you sure didn't see it making any hardware adjustments in response to Sony. Nintendo kept the cartridge format to combat piracy. But Jeff Haynes, IGN PlayStation editor, points to a very fateful moment in videogame history that could have greatly impacted Nintendo's fate with the N64: Nintendo stiffing Sony over their planned CD-ROM attachment for the Super NES.

Jeff Haynes, IGN PlayStation: Were Sony to have never entered the business, I'd have to think that there would be a couple of significant differences. Since they had been working with Nintendo initially on a CD ROM format, I'd have to think that Nintendo would've taken the hardware and run with it as an attempt to combat the disc based games from SEGA, which was easily its largest competitor at the time. With the Jaguar and the 3DO floundering, the addition of a Sony based CD ROM would've given Nintendo the presence and disc space required to take many of what would become the N64's popular cartridge games and bring them to a completely new level. Could you imagine how incredible Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, Ocarina of Time or even Super Mario 64 would have been if it wasn't limited by the sheer size of the cartridge itself? These classics could have become even stronger than before. In many ways, this one element could have hastened the demise of SEGA's console aspirations, convincing them to forgo working on the Dreamcast entirely because of the strength of Nintendo's library, which was already holding its own against the SEGA CD and Saturn. Of course, that would possibly mean that the industry as a whole would either be dominated by Nintendo, or would have to wait for competition from another company like Microsoft that was willing to take them on, but that's a radical guess for revisionist history.

Final Fantasy VII Lands Where?

Nintendo's decision to stick with cartridges and Sony's embrace of discs led to the monumental decision of Square to break its longstanding ties with Nintendo. Square's epic vision for Final Fantasy VII needed extra storage. When Nintendo settled on silicon, Square felt it had no choice. It went to Sony and gave the PlayStation an extra boost of legitimacy with hardcore gamers.

Without Sony, what would have happened to this landmark game? If Nintendo had proceeded with the CD-ROM attachment for the Super NES with Sony, there's a good chance Nintendo might have gone ahead with discs for the Nintendo 64. Square would have kept with Nintendo and Final Fantasy VII would have remained with the hardware maker that had hosted it from the beginning.

Now, if there was no CD add-on for the Super NES and the Nintendo 64 existed as it does now, would Square have felt the need to move to the other console maker that did use discs? Imagine if Square had approached SEGA with Final Fantasy VII. Talk about a game-changer. A Saturn with a strong library of first- and third-party games joined by Square's massive JRPG? That could have been a major blow to Nintendo, just like SEGA's Genesis, loaded with arcade ports and Sonic the Hedgehog, inhaled a lot of Nintendo's 16-bit market share.

Square itself is largely responsible for the success of Final Fantasy VII and the heightened awareness of RPGs with console gamers, but as Ryan Clements, editor of IGN PlayStation, contends, there is no denying that the entire genre benefited from Sony's intense desire to see it explored and celebrated on the PlayStation.

Ryan Clements, IGN PlayStation: If Sony never dove into the videogame industry with the original PlayStation, I suppose I would have theoretically never missed it in the first place. But I know now that I would miss it, as the PlayStation systems have been my favorites for years and have helped shape the RPG genre, which has become an undeniable facet of gaming.

All Those DVD Players

Chris Roper, editor-in-chief of IGN PlayStation, was quick to point out the impact of one of the PlayStation 2's chief non-gaming features: DVD playback. Without Sony even getting into the game with the original PlayStation, would any other console of the previous generation have included the feature? SEGA did not include it in the Dreamcast and the DVD was hardly a non-starter by 1999. VHS was unequivocally on the way out and consumers were becoming seriously interested in the superior video format.

There is an argument to be made about Sony's decision to offer DVD playback in each PS2 being a driving force behind consumer adoption of the format. The PS2 was the first DVD player in a lot of homes. Perhaps they would have made the switch sometime over the lifecycle of DVD (still ongoing) as the price of dedicated DVD players dropped, but the PS2 was a factor in its adoption. Not everybody that bought a PS2 used it is a DVD player, of course, but with well over 100 million PS2s in the world... well, that's a lot of DVD players. Hollywood was grateful.

As an electronics giant, not just a game company, Sony has made investments in pushing consoles to becoming multimedia devices. The most obvious right now is the PS3 and Blu-ray playback. Blu-ray won the high-def format war (sorry about that HD-DVD add-on you bought for your Xbox 360), but it's hardly the success that DVD was. Would Blu-ray even exist without the PS3 as the mechanism to drive adoption?

Haynes speculates, "Considering that the PS2 was helped push DVDs, and the PS3 was instrumental in winning the format war, let's assume that Sony didn't have the same kind of pull or sway as a hardware partner that they do with their own console. It's completely possible that HD-DVD would be the only format that would've emerged, but it's also possible that the massive push to take advantage of the HD revolution wouldn't have raced forward in the same manner that it was pursued thanks to Microsoft and Sony trying to one up each other on the technical front."

Regardless, Sony's gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) nudges into making videogame machine convergence devices has altered our perception of what we expect from a console.

Whither Microsoft?

Nintendo and SEGA were organic rivals in 1995. Each was a titan of the industry and the console war between the fierce competitors took on an epic quality. Sony's entry into the market was more of a business decision -- an opportunity. Spurned by Nintendo's last-minute decision to not advance their joint CD project, Sony went ahead and developed a console on its own to compete with Nintendo and SEGA. The rest is history. The PlayStation won the generation hands-down and paved the way for absolute domination with the PS2.

Had an outsider like Sony not come into the landscape and completely rewritten the pecking order, would Microsoft have ever jumped in? Remember, Sony did a lot of outreach work to get videogames into mainstream culture. Up until 1995, SEGA and Nintendo seemed quite happy combating each other over the same audience. Sony wanted to explode the notion of who is a gamer and deliberately went about doing so after proving to the hardcore, early adopter segment that it was indeed serious about videogames.


Microsoft wasn't uninterested in videogames in 1995, but it still had its hands quite full with Windows, Office, and a number of high profile projects as well as the burgeoning Internet. If Sony had not proven that an outsider could splash the pot, would Microsoft have even bothered diversifying into videogames? Would we have the Xbox or Xbox 360 at this point?

Try to imagine right now if the videogame world was defined still by Nintendo and SEGA. The Wii would be a doubtful proposition because it exists in part as a reaction to the tech arms race between Sony and Microsoft -- the two former outsiders. And while the Dreamcast might have been a very different machine, SEGA would likely still be in the hardware game. Perhaps with limited options, more people would have bought Panzer Dragoon and Jet Set Radio.

This leads to what is most likely the greatest impact Sony's entry had on the trajectory of videogames: tone.

Mature Gaming

Nintendo is still doing handsome business with Mario and SEGA's recent Sonic game, Sonic Unleashed, recently crossed the two million mark worldwide. Both companies still operate in a comfort zone of sorts they have not abandoned since the Reagan Era: bright escapism. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with completely fantastical videogames. After the rush of Grand Theft Auto III imitators that employed market-tested urban atmosphere, bright escapism was a sweet release.

In 1995, though, videogames were still largely kid stuff. With plumbers that collected coins and ride dinosaurs, many grown-ups could not relate to videogames. Aging teens moving into adulthood felt the need to put away so-called childish things for social reasons. There may have been artistry to videogames, such as the soundtrack of ActRaiser, but videogames were arguably not art themselves.

Sony changed that.

In its desire to make videogames something for audiences beyond the typical gamers (much like Nintendo's drive to bring in new audiences with the Wii), Sony either pushed or encouraged developers to try concepts that appealed to new people. And here is where Sony radically changed the face of videogames forever.

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Would mature narratives like Mass Effect have existed without Sony?

As mentioned earlier, some retrogamers claim that Sony "ruined" games by taking them mainstream. It's understandable to selfishly want to keep something special to yourself. That's just human nature. But what these gamers need to understand is that in 1995, the industry was painting itself into a corner. When you have just two rivals digging at each other over and over again, the competition may remain fierce, but it also grows stale. And musty rivalry does not advance the ball. Yes, Nintendo and Rare pioneered the use of CG-rendered sprites in Donkey Kong Country and that was a great visual push. But that was a refinement for the platformer genre. It was not revolution.

Sony's arrival signaled a new direction for the industry. With Sony's move to mature games (as in making them less playthings, not necessarily traffic in more blood and sexual content), developers expanded their own boundaries. Do you think Capcom would have made Resident Evil without Sony's effort to "age" videogames? Would Hideo Kojima have seen a bolder vision for the Metal Gear universe?

The maturing of content in the PlayStation generation emboldened Sony then to try out some pretty astounding concepts of its own. Gran Turismo, whether you like the series or not, offered a wholly new way to look at racing games. However, it was the next round of hardware, the PS2, which really let Sony attempt some mature ideas, such as Ico. Haynes and IGN Insider's Michael Thomsen each have strong opinions on how Sony irrevocably altered the tone of videogames with its arrival -- and most certainly for the better.

Haynes: While there were some mature games that wound up emerging in the N64 days, like Nightmare Creatures, Conker's Bad Fur Day and Quake 64, Nintendo was, and has been a family friendly company. Many of the franchises that have pushed the artistic and expressive boundaries of gaming, such as Twisted Metal, Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear Solid probably wouldn't have ever had a chance of being made or released in a solely, or primarily Nintendo-dominated industry. Would we have horror games in the same way, like Silent Hill, Fatal Frame or Dead Space? Apart from the violence or scares, games like Ico, WipEout and Gran Turismo probably wouldn't have seen the light of day. While it's arguable that RPGs would've possibly made their way to the Nintendo, particularly because of Squeenix's history of supporting Nintendo since its NES days, it's not necessarily the same with the more adult themed titles that would help push the industry along as kid gamers grew into adult gamers looking for something other than the next Mario adventure. Nintendo's slowly been moving into that arena now with games like MadWorld and No More Heroes, but without being pushed by companies like Sony and Microsoft, gaming might've been a much cleaner and more saccharine-sweet niche experience.

Michael Thomsen, IGN Insider: I think the bigger issue would be about how the landscape of game development would have changed, absent Sony's unabashed ambitions that gaming could be art and should be promoted as such. Would Fumito Ueda have found a home with Nintendo or Microsoft? Would he have been given so much free reign with Ico? Would David Jaffe have become a household name without Sony's support?

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The game that settled the "are games art?" debate.

No Shadow of the Colossus? The horror. But tell us what you think. Did Sony change the industry for the better? Or do you think the effects Sony had on videogames would have happened organically?

The great value of Sony has always been their focus on gaming as a legitimately adult pastime. Even while they struggle with the PS3 they continue to push the boundaries in a way that neither Microsoft of Nintendo seems willing to, with games like Flower, Everyday Shooter, and Heavy Rain. Microsoft would have continued to own the online space while wooing PC developers into console work, Nintendo would have continued making timeless classics with its own Disney-esque touch while providing the biggest install base for third parties. SEGA would have continued to flounder with its tone-deaf sense of global gaming aesthetics. Gamers would have missed out on the handful of prescient creative gambles that Sony took with their own first party titles that no one else seems capable of mirroring. The world never would have gotten Shadow of the Colossus.

If sony never got in the game i would never been born :S lol but surely we would all be microsoft whores

if sony never got into gaming most of these changes still would have happened around the same time. however it may have taken extra years for microsoft to introduce thee original xbox.

If sony never got in the game in 1995 they would of done on a later date without a doubt. Nothing would of changed. Perhaps the ps3 might of came out in 2009

The whole point is that IF they didn't get into video games, not at a later time, but never.