PlayStation 2 Review

Nothing about the hardware explains it. The Emotion Engine was a nightmare to write for, 4 MB of video RAM forced constant texture juggling, and both Xbox and GameCube rendered cleaner images with less effort from developers. What Sony had instead was a $299 DVD player at a moment when standalone players cost more than that, backward compatibility with the entire PS1 library, and an install base so large that publishers simply had to be there.

The result is the deepest catalogue the medium has produced: Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Silent Hill 2, God of War, Persona 3, Devil May Cry, Katamari Damacy, Guitar Hero and Gran Turismo 3, plus a long tail of mid-budget oddities no other platform could sustain. The Slimline in 2004 shrank it to the size of a paperback and kept it selling until 2013, thirteen years after launch, past 155 million units. Judged as silicon it is merely fine. Judged as the thing that decided what games got made for a decade, nothing else is close.