This Round-Up covers the following entries of All PS1 Games in Order:

Parts 001 - 004: Launch Day Round-Up

Part 005:Cyberspeed, PGA Tour 96, Off-World Interceptor Extreme, and Mortal Kombat 3

Part 006: Theme Park, Cyber Sled, WWF Wrestlemania - The Arcade Game, and X-COM: UFO Defense

Part 007: Jumping Flash!, Novastorm, and Twisted Metal

Part 008: Tekken, NFL Gameday, Warhawk, and Primal Rage

Part 009: Criticom, Discworld, Destruction Derby, and Doom

Part 010: Zoop, Agile Warrior F-111X, Lemmings 3D, and WipEout

Part 011: FIFA 96, Defcon 5, Space Griffon VF-9, and Viewpoint

Part 011A: We Need To Talk About Space Griffon VF-9

Part 012: NHL FaceOff, Hi-Octane, Thunderstrike 2, and Shockwave Assault

Part 013: Jupiter Strike, Geom Cube, Leaded, and Gex

Part 014: NBA in the Zone, Zero Divide, Bases Loaded '96: Double Header, and Road Rash

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1995 in Review

1995 was kind of a messy year in console gaming. In North America, the biggest events were the launches of the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation with their unusual 4 month release gap. On top of that, the whole Virtual Boy debacle unfolded throughout this year. We also saw the final demise of the Sega CD, with game releases drying up by mid-year, and the sharp decline into oblivion of the early-to-market 32-bit consoles, the 3DO and Atari Jaguar. As the hardware market grew more crowded, Nintendo was able to retake the worldwide sales lead from Sega, though the Genesis still outsold the SNES in the US. Hopefully Nintendo wasn't overly celebrating their sales success, as the truly incredible monthly performance of the Playstation in all regions foretold lean years ahead for every manufacturer not named Sony.

I want to throw around sales number when talking about the console market, but reliable information is really hard to come by. If I was comfortable tossing off unverifiable numbers, I would say that the PS1 sold twice as many units (800,000) as the Saturn (400,000) in North America in only half the time. But, I can't verify those numbers so I'm just going off of relative positioning between the major players. I'm also going to be wary of specific software sales numbers from this time period as well, so if I say anything, it'll just be general statements there as well. For example, when I see the claim that Gex sold 1 million copies on the 3DO, I have no idea how true that is; I want to live in a world where that didn't happen, but maybe it did, I dunno. So, I'll look at (more) verifiable things like numbers of software game releases and their relative quality.

Not getting into specific numbers, I want to point out that Sony was taking a huge bite out of Sega's market share in the US and Europe and Nintendo's market share in Japan. This was kind of an incredible event, as all previous entrants to the console wars since 1983 not named Nintendo or Sega crashed and burned almost immediately. Hell, the only reason the Genesis did so well before that was due to Nintendo's arrogant complacence outside of Japan in the late '80's, leaving a big opening for anyone willing to make the effort to learn English. It doesn't seem like Nintendo and Sega made errors as big as that one during the run up to 1995. If anything, the industry was so flooded with hardware and hardware add-ons that it should have been difficult for anyone to break through.

Before going further, let's take a look at some of the promotional material for the Playstation being bandied about (Note: the motherfuckers sped up some of the game clips in this video to make the games seem more exciting).

I've pointed out a few times the incredible investment Sony put into the international release of the Playstation. They ended up as an also-ran in Japan during the '94 launch season, so the best path for success was to drive Sega out of their western niche. And I do mean Sega, not Nintendo. The kinds of games Sony was pushing in the US were the types of games that had lifted the Genesis above the SNES in popularity: arcade accurate ports and action games. The SNES was still the place to go for platformers and RPGS in 1995, with the releases of games like Donkey Kong Country 2, Yoshi's Island, and Chrono Trigger. Sega never really had a good answer in those genres (yes, I'm including Sonic and Phantasy Star, fuck 'em) and Sony didn't really try that hard to fill out those genres in the west either. Looking at the platformers, Rayman was a typical Ubisoft out-on-everything release, Gex was a 3DO port, and Jumping Flash! was too weird for most Americans. As for RPGs, I think Space Griffon must have circumvented SCEA content control somehow because there's no way in hell Sony would've wanted to put that anime-ass nonsense in front of frat boys. Most of the big PS1 games are either the most accurate arcade ports or some flavor of shooter. That not only ate Sega's lunch but also staked a claim for the up-and-coming shooter genres on consoles. The efforts Sony made in Sports games shouldn't be discounted either. They went to incredible efforts to get a comprehensive spread of games in full 3D as fast as possible, going so far as to produce themselves what they couldn't license.

This all isn't even getting into the media environment for videos games at that time. That would probably take a fully researched book to adequately explain. Suffice to say that Sony was dropping a truly notable amount of marketing money and making deals with any western publishers they could get their hands on. Now, all of that is just to get their foot in the door. As we go on, we're going to see the early success of the Playstation draw attention and enter into a virtuous cycle of third-party development and high sales. The answer as to why Sony was able to hit it big where so many others failed was probably a combination of money and timing. There will be plenty of opportunities to look at this more as we progress through the PS1 catalog.

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Numbers and Charts

Now for the fun part. According to me, the PS1 had exactly 50 games released in North America between 9/9 and 12/31 in 1995. Let's do a breakdown of what kinds of games these were and their release months:

Man, I love charts. So, we can see from the above comparison table the expected concentration of releases in November and December. Also, we can see the reliance on quick and dirty ports to fill out store shelves in the first couple of months of the console's life until they could get the real stuff shipped out. That's also fairly typical for console launches. The thing that surprised me when putting the table together is how few 3DO ports actually came out. I could name all five of the accursed things off the top of my head, so those games must have caused a disproportionate amount of pain for their scanty numbers.

I'm also curious about the development region for these games, due to the aforementioned emphasis Sony put on western development:

Keep in mind that the PS1 was out in Japan a whole year before its international launch. The fact that they didn't just throw that many of the existing Japanese released games out in North America goes to show the extent to which Sony went in order to have western games for western audiences and Japanese games for Japanese audiences. This was a boon for British game development as much as anything else, as all but one of the European developed games were made in the UK. That means I wasn't crazy when I felt like I was playing too many Psygnosis games, there ARE too many Psygnosis games on this console. But all of this raises the further question: Even though a plurality of these games were made in the US or UK and were original development, were they any good?

That question is inherently subjective and belongs as a subset of art criticism. That is why I'm going boil this shit down to a set of numbers. Screw nuance. I'm going to create a number representing the quality of any grouping of PS1 games on a scale from 0 to 5. Now, I'm not doing this by grading each game, fuck that noise. I'm going to base it on my unauthorized, unofficial, and wholly canonical ranking of all PS1 games. I begin doing this by taking the current list, dividing it into quintiles (5 groups of equal size), and assigning each quintile a number value. This would mean I assign the top quintile (the best games) a score of 5, the next quintile 4, and so on down to 1. For whichever grouping of games we're looking at, I will take the quintile score for each game and take the average for the group. As an example, for the five games that came out in October 1995 (Mortal Kombat 3, Theme Park, Cyber Sled, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and X-COM: UFO Defense) the total quintile score would be 2 + 4 + 4 + 5 + 1 = 16. and the average would be 3.2. That final number is thus the rating I give the October '95 release line-up. This rating system is officially named the Borgmaster Ordinal Ranking Qualifier (BORQ) and it will allow us to compare the overall quality of any group of PS1 games with any other group of PS1 games. Let's look at those game source and development region charts again, but using the BORQ.

Fundamentally, the BORQ assumes 3.00 as the absolute average of all games, which means that any score above 3.00 is going to be good and any score below 3.00 is going to be bad. We could consider positive or negative distance from 3.00 to measure a magnitude of quality, but I'm not fully comfortable taking the abstraction that far. Looking at what we have, we can confidently state the no-brainer that Japanese arcade ports were on average the best PS1 games released in 1995. We can also see why the 3DO ports had an outsized impact, those games stank so bad you could smell them from a mile away. We also see the gulf in quality between Japanese and western game development; though a lot of this effect could be due to Namco, who became the MVP of Playstation releases by putting out Air Combat, Ridge Racer, Tekken, and Cyber Sled which have an average BORQ of 4.5 , the best of any multi-release publisher or developer. I invite everyone reading this to draw their own conclusions from the above data.

Now, because I have the BORQ to work with, I can take a look back at the first 14 parts in this series and evaluate the quality of games we've looked at each week:

This pretty well lines up to the overall monthly BORQ scores, but broken out more granularly. Even still, we can identify the point in the late November releases where everything went to hell. That point was roughly 11/20 with the release of Zoop. Of course Zoop was the inflection point, I can think of no more important game of 1995 than Zoop. Where would we be without Zoop? Probably a better place. Everyone has their theories about when we diverged into the bad timeline, for me it was the moment Zoop hit store shelves. That was the highest point of our civilization, and it's all been downhill from there. As a side note, I had to add Zoop to my word processor's dictionary because of how much it comes up.

Now, I can hear you voicing the obvious criticism: "this BORQ thing is a bad metric because the values will inherently change as the list grows. Also your ranking choices suck." Because I'm good at taking criticism, my first response to you would be, "shut up, nerd." My second response is that the BORQ for any given game Is supposed to change over time. It's an indication of the quality of games in a set library relative to the rest of that library. The numbers above show the view of the Playstation library as of 12/31/95. For example, the view from 12/31/96 would be different, but that isn't relevant for 1995 because 1996 hasn't happened yet. The final, true BORQ values for PS1 games is of course achievable, and one day we will get there. For now, I will evaluate the PS1 catalog at whatever moment in time I happen to be at in its lifecycle, and re-running all of the numbers every time I do the analysis is just an opportunity to make snapshots in time, which might be interesting to compare in their own right. You might think that this kind of analysis is a bad idea, and you would be right. Nevertheless, no one can stop me, so we'll be taking a look at these numbers again from time to time. Also, my ranking choices are the one and only correct rankings of PS1 games and if you don't like it maybe try reevaluating your life or something.

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PS1 1995 GOTY Awards

Exactly 50 games were released for the PS1 in 1995. That's a very clean number that I am suspicious of just as much as you are. But, taking those as canon we possess the ability to do a much belated Game of The Year list.

I already have my own rankings (here), so if I wanted I could begin and end this by calling Air Combat the GOTY. That wouldn't be much fun, so let's try to build a more objective and traditional top ten list. I'm putting a direct screengrab of my spreadsheet below for reference purposes.

So, we need to get 50 games down to 10 and order them reasonably. Step one is to cut out the most heinous garbage. That gets us to the 42 games seen in the first list above.

For step two, lets weed out the games that are still bad enough to not be considered good (try squaring that statement) and the sports games. That last point might seem unfair, but I have something else planned for the sports games. We now have a list of 16 "good" games in the second list. You may notice some cuts that were personally painful, such as Space Griffon or Cyberspeed which have both lived in my head rent-free ever since I played them. Just because I'm drawn to weird crap doesn't mean that they aren't still crap. You may also notice that Warhawk and Twisted Metal are still here even though I hated the damn things. Despite the way I feel about them, I will acknowledge that they were well put together games for their time regardless of being miserable for me to play.

Step three gets a bit more arbitrary. Here I'm filtering out ports whose existence isn't significant. This automatically includes the PC ports (Doom, Theme Park, and Discworld) that were able to sneak through this far and the arcade ports that don't feel important (WWF Wrestlemania, The Raiden Project, and Cyber Sled). I feel like I need to give more justification for that second group. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game doesn't rate further inclusion because it's a licensed game that was also ported to a bunch of other systems as well as the PS1, The Raiden Project is disqualified because it's a compilation, and Cyber Sled gets the cut because its port to the PS1 just doesn't feel important or meaningful in any way. That's definitely more vibes-based than the other steps, but it has to be done. After these cuts we are down to a top ten list, which is the third list above.

Now for the last and weirdest step. I reordered the ten remaining games by some kind of (more) objective standards. When looking at each of these games, I tried to evaluate them based on the questions:

• Is this game a complete thought?
• Is the creative idea behind that thought any good?
• Is that creative thought properly executed?
• Is the end product novel in any way?

That all seems loosey-goosey, because it is. But even then, I think that those four questions capture enough of the objective quality of a game without taking into consideration my own enjoyment. You could make the argument that fun is the ultimate determinant of quality, and for that I point you to my original list. Applying the above logic, I arrived at the final list:

1. Tekken
2. Ridge Racer
3. WipEout
4. Air Combat
5. Jumping Flash!
6. Destruction Derby
7. Warhawk
8. Twisted Metal
9. Zero Divide
10. Zoop (of course this thing ended up here without my noticing)

This is really a top five list with five honorable mentions tacked on at the end. The main points to note are the demotions of Air Combat and Jumping Flash! from first and second down to fourth and fifth, and the come-from-behind top ranking of Tekken. Air Combat passes the first question, gets a shrug on the second, more than passes the third, and fails the fourth; it's a standard Flight Combat game executed as well as physically possible for the time, which only makes it highly polished rote no matter how much I enjoyed it. Jumping Flash! Was an easier call to make because it feels like a job half done, even if it was the first of its kind (for the questions: hard fail, pass, shrug, strong pass). Tekken ends up on top because, in spite of my own feelings, I can't deny the quality of the package in the context of its time. This game is one of the most complete thoughts of a game on this list, the idea of making a better Virtua Fighter was undeniably correct, the actual end product is as well made as a 3D fighting game could be at the time, and it was only the second one of these kind of games that was worth a damn. So congratulations to Tekken for technically being the best PS1 game of 1995, I will likely never play it again.

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Ranking of Sports (Presented by Blitzball)

Now we're at the rankings that really matter. SPORTS. What's the best one? That might seem unanswerable to those lacking imagination. Here though, we can use the undeniable NEXT GEN POWER of the Playstation to answer that age old question. Starting now, and continuing onward, I will maintain a ranking of sports based solely on the PS1 games representing them. I've created the preliminary list below, but before we get to it I want to thank this segment's sponsor: Blitzball. We can all admit that Blitzball is objectively the best sport. Really, all other sports are pale imitations of the one true sport of Blitzball. We all know why Blitzball is the greatest sport, so I don't need to explain it here. Unfortunately, it would not be portrayed in all its majesty until the PS2, thus being ineligible for this ranking. Let's look at this inherently incomplete list:

As we can see, there aren't any repeat sports yet, though there will be and yes that's a threat. You might be saying, "Borgmaster, you paragon of humanity, there were actually two Basketball games!" I would say to you in that case that the types of basketball in NBA Jam and NBA In The Zone are altogether different due to the difference in the number of players, which is why I count them separately. Don’t blame me for that, blame video games in the '90's for not having their shit together. The only commentary to make on these provisional rankings is to congratulate Hockey (if it's real) on being the best sport and to conclude that we would all be better off in a future where Star Trek is right about Baseball.

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Best Box Art

WINNER: Zero Divide (PAL Cover)

Runners Up: WipEout (PAL Cover), Jupiter Strike (Japanese Cover)

What was it about the 90's that caused games to have way better box art in in every territory other than North America? The European or Japanese box arts are almost always the best ones. Did publishers really have such a low opinion of American tastes? Actually, don't answer that.

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Issues with PS1 Chronogaming

Before we look ahead at what comes next, I want to take this opportunity to indulge in some navel-gazing about the concept of chronogaming for the PS1. The main gimmick for this blog series is to look at every game in release order, ala the glorious progenitor Dr. Sparkle. This commitment ran me headfirst into the problem that has been hounding old game nerds for years: most games released before approximately the year 2000 didn't have hard and fast dates that they hit shelves. Either no one cared at the time to write down the exact release date or, what I think is the real reason, anything that wasn't a big tentpole release just unevenly filtered through to all of the various game retailers over a couple of weeks or so. That second possibility would have led to different stores in different regions getting a game like Defcon 5 or Bases Loaded '96 on different days over some period of time. This made sense for companies that treated games like toys and not like other creative media such as movies, music, or books, but it's a major hassle for future chroniclers.

This wasn't a problem for just the PS1, in fact other consoles in the early to the mid-90's seem to have had even worse record keeping. This is exacerbated by games that release months or years apart between territories. This leads to the date of first release getting recorded in most places and all subsequent releases getting ignored. Finally, different places that do list release dates for different versions and regions often disagree on those dates. If PSX Data Center, Wikipedia, and Giant Bomb all disagree on a release date and none of them cite a source, how Is anyone supposed to know which one is correct? It's a mystery of the universe at that point. I finally understand why Gerstmann was so concerned for so many years about getting game releases filled out on this site.

With all of the unknowable issues around putting together a timeline, I've decided to not try too hard to be 100% accurate. I've ended up mostly going off of the PSX Data Center dates unless they seem massively off. So far, the only date I've seen from there that looks completely wrong is for Revelations: Persona, which is a whole six months off. There isn't really much of a point to reveal all of this sausage making, I just needed to get it off my chest.

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Looking Forward

Now, what's ahead? 1996 would be the sensible answer, but that's not how I work. As I've gone through the Playstation's launch season, I had the nagging question of what were the other options for 32-bit gaming. Was the success of these games on this system the correct outcome? In 1995 the only real competition was the Sega Saturn, due to the 3DO being on its last legs and the Atari Jaguar having long since died on arrival. Even though we know who wins, how good or bad was the alternative for polygonal gaming? To answer that, I'm going to spend the next eight weeks changing gears to a companion series: All Saturn Games in Order.

This alternate series is going to work mostly the same as the current one, but with a few important caveats. First, I'm looking at the Saturn in relation to the PS1, so I'm not going to go into as much depth for any individual game. Second, because we're going to run into multi-platform games and shared ports, I will only give brief coverage of those mainly for the purpose of going through any differences between the Saturn and PS1 versions. These two caveats together are going to lead to my covering more games per week for the Saturn than for the PS1. I'm aiming for 5 - 7 games per week for the Saturn compared to the 3 - 4 games per week for the PS1. Third, I'm going to run this series as breaks from the main PS1 series, so I'm going to go through the Saturn in 1995 after going through the PS1 in 1995, and so on from here on out. Lastly, Saturn emulation is not as reliable or consistent as PS1 emulation, so I fully expect to run into moderate-to-severe technical issues as this goes on.

On a final note, because I take seriously the health and safety of those reading this series, I have to disclose the existence of a Hydlide game on the Saturn. To make sure that no one is exposed to Hydlide without their consent, I am implementing a Hydlide Alert System that I will keep updated as we approach Virtual Hydlide. The alert chart is available below.

So, with that explanation out of the way, next week we will kick off with Part 01 covering the May 11, 1995 launch day line-up for the Saturn: Clockwork Knight, Daytona USA, Panzer Dragoon, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Virtua Fighter, and the word salad that is Worldwide Soccer: Sega International Victory Goal Edition.

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Hall of Unused Screenshots

Rayman:

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Street Fighter: The Movie:

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Cyberspeed:

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Off-World Interceptor Extreme:

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Mortal Kombat 3:

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Jumping Flash!:

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Lemmings 3D:

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Space Griffon VF-9:

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Hi-Octane:

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Shockwave Assault:

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Gex:

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Bases Loaded '96: Double Header:

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Road Rash:

What's it like running the best ongoing blog series on the site?

@jeffrud: Ah geez, I have no idea how to respond to that. I'm just aiming for third best.

Also, I didn't include this in the main post because it isn't that relevant, there is a good breakdown of the PS1 hardware architecture written up by a guy named Rodrigo Copetti. It's primarily interesting when looking at it in comparison to the cognitohazardous architecture of the Saturn. That probably had something to do with Sony winning over third-party support as thoroughly as they did.

I might concur with JeffRud, despite being a rival of sorts. The comprehensiveness of this round-up is impressive and the quality of your writing has steadily improved since you started. Of a similar tier as ZombiePie's equally loquacious examinations of the Final Fantasy franchise.

I'm also glad we have another fan of Dr. Sparkle on the site. So much of my wiki editing and wiki-related blogging was inspired by his work with the various Chron- series. I've heard the dude's been through a rough spot lately so I hope he bounces back.

Anyway, good luck with the Saturn. I've been batting around blogging ideas for that system too, but I should probably should finish up Mega Archive first. I'll be sure to check out your coverage for any highlights (it has a Japan-only Dungeon Master sequel that strikes me as intriguing, though it's sadly yet to be fan-translated).

Okay, let's not fight. You're all the best writers on the site. You get a gold star. Yes, you!

For real though, I'm inclined to more or less mug the quartile system outlined here for Something.

@mento: Yeah, the Chron series are pretty much a direct inspiration. But in all seriousness, yourself and ZombiePie's blogs have been super inspirational as well. Less seriously, it sounds like you need to learn Japanese. Can't be that hard.

I've been kicking around an idea involving going through all of the Simple 1500 games in order (a "150,000 Yen Challenge" if you will), unless someone else does it first. I kinda hope someone else does it first because it seems like it would be kind of a hassle.

@jeffrud: I would be overjoyed to see other uses of the Ordinal Ranking Qualifier! It is as useful as it is silly.

Ridge Racer is my favorite PS1 launch title.

This absolutely radiates power. You are all the heroes we need but don't deserve! Fully on board for some Sega Shenanigans. (Now there's a platform fighter we can all get behind)

Does the Saturn start the show with the show-stopper? Get ready for some FMV Golf, y'all! (Also taking the brave, contrarian stance that Panzer Dragoon is pretty good actually)

this BORQ thing is a bad metric because the values will inherently change as the list grows. Also your ranking choices suck.

Also Borgmaster, you paragon of humanity, there were actually two Basketball games!

All hail the Blitzball and the power of the Jecht Shot. Being able to take out multiple opponents before the blocking phase is the ultimate power move in Sports.

@manburger: Wait, do people not like Panzer Dragoon? It's literally the only good Saturn launch title.

@onemanarmyy:

1) Shut up, nerd!

2) 2v2 and 4v4 Basketball are inherently different. Don't blame me, blame Midway and Konami. For Everything.

3) I don't want to hear about Soccer unless the players are doing Venom Shots. If Cristiano Ronaldo can't pull off a Jecht Shot then I don't want to hear about him.

@borgmaster:

Cristiano Ronaldo takes icebaths constantly, trying to eventually be able to play sports underwater. Sadly, he's at the end of his career and still hasn't played sports underwater so that nerd is definitly a waste of time to care about.

@borgmaster: Oh! Woops, I hope not, I was just joshing: I thought the Dragoons were the best Saturn originals? (Dunno how much of the library is legitimately good) Have not played Saga, but it is my impression it is interesting/impressive and quite ambitious. (Perhaps it buckles under that ambition? It was at least lauded at the time)

@manburger:I'm beginning to get the impression that the only worthwhile Saturn games are either Panzer Dragoon titles or random forgotten gems (also forgotten "gems", like Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend).

The impression I always had for Panzer Dragoon Saga is that because it came out so late and had such a limited run in the west, it's gained an outsized legend. Up until Saturn emulation became reliable (enough) a few years ago, maybe only a total of a few thousand English speakers had ever touched the thing. Those few thousand people could say whatever they wanted about the game everyone else just kinda went with it. It was also one of the most consistently expensive used games for a while. I remember talking to the proprietor of a used game store about seven years ago where he showed off a copy of Saga that he had assembled from various loose discs he had tracked down. That thing cost like $500 at the time. I haven't played it yet, but I fully expect that the game is only just "kinda neat".

I think you objective Top-10 makes sense, those do seem to be the good games. And, since I didn't have my PSX until 1996 I didn't play any of those games much except Tekken. In fact most of teh early games I did not play.

These were the first ten games I bought, just five or six each year it seems:

1. 3/28/96 NBA Shoot Out
2. 6/28/96 Fade to Black
3. 8/28/96 Tekken 2
4. 11/15/96 Tomb Raider
5. 1/22/97 Carnage Heart
6. 2/28/97 Soul Blade
7. 3/27/97 Vandal Hearts
8. 5/14/97 Rage Racer

9. 5/30/97 Ace Combat 2

10. 09/26/97 Resident Evil Director's Cut

After this first ten I started buying the 'older games' used, so it get muddy about what games I was playing. I did get the first Tekken eventually and play it a good bit. I played a lot of demos too, so it never seemed like I had to wait to play something interesting.

From my perspective (which is scandinavian to be clear), I didn't get the Saturn because of poor advertising and the lack of sequels in series like Sonic, Streets of Rage, Earthworm Jim and Toejam & Earl, as well as a (perceived anyway) lack of games like Zelda 3, Super Metroid and Secret of Mana/Evermore. In 1995 I was still happy with SNES and MD games, and also had a PC that could play Warcraft 2, C&C and Doom clones, then got a new one a year or two later which could play more recent 3D games and started playing games like Diablo, SC and Quake 2 online.

I don't remember much talk about either the SAT or PS1 before the N64 also arrived to be honest, I think I got my PS1 in late 1997 or early 1998 after having rented it once maybe 6-8 months before. Tomb Raider, FF7 and OoT were early games with what I'd call more widespread hype at school, later RE2, Gran Turismo, MGS, Tony Hawk. Maybe Crash Bandicoot too, personally I was sick of platformers at that point and didn't like the character. But playing the earliest games retrospectively I'm not that surprised the PS1 was doing better by the end of 1995.