PlayStation (Original) Review

Sony entered the business as a jilted partner and won on economics before it won on hardware. Discs cost pennies to press against tens of dollars for a cartridge, which meant bigger games, cheaper games, and a shelf restocked in days rather than months, and the developers Nintendo had spent a decade squeezing moved across almost as a group. What arrived on that shelf is one of the great libraries: Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Gran Turismo, Tekken 3, Symphony of the Night, Silent Hill, Crash and Spyro, alongside an enormous quantity of odd Japanese work that only a cheap disc made viable.

The hardware itself is the weakest part of the story. Textures are not perspective corrected, so surfaces swim as the camera turns, geometry wobbles because vertex positions are stored coarsely, and loading is the price of the disc. None of it mattered. The controller settled the modern layout, twin analog sticks arrived on its revision, and a hundred million people bought one.