An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.

Post 001: Air Combat, Battle Arena Toshinden

Post 002: ESPN Extreme Games, Kileak: The DNA Imperative

Post 003: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, Power Serve 3D Tennis, The Raiden Project

Post 004: Rayman, Ridge Racer, Street Fighter: The Movie, Total Eclipse Turbo

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The Sony Playstation launched in North America a little over 9 months after its initial release in japan and about 4 months after the Sega Saturn's North American launch. The 1994 Japan launch was only 3 weeks after Saturn's and it was outsold 500k to 300k. That isn't bad if you look at it as being in a similar tier of upstart consoles as the TurboGrafix and 3DO, but it wasn't the obviously dominate product we all know. By the time we get to 9/9/95, Sony had pulled out all of the stops to make this thing a massive hit in the US. They put their best foot forward at E3 four months earlier, undercut the Saturn on price by $100, and most importantly they supposedly dropped tens of millions of marketing dollars to blanket the youth media in ads.

While I personally would have been turned off by that "edgy" advertising, I guess it was the popular style of the time. This thing sold out the first run of 100,000 units on launch day and permanently made Sega an afterthought in this hemisphere. But what kind of games did this hot new piece of tech actually run?

Of the 11 games (12 when counting The Raiden Project as two separate games) that I am considering as the canonical launch games on the PS1, only Air Combat, Ridge Racer, NBA Jam, and Raiden II can be described as "good" games. The rest are some flavor of crap. Now just because a game is crap doesn't mean it can't be fun and likewise a good game can give no enjoyment whatsoever. As such I ranked the games I have looked at so far by how much I subjectively liked playing them, and I plan to update the list as I go along in this series. I foresee no negative long-term repercussions in doing this.

(The List insert feature isn't working for me, so here's a link to the list)

Of the games on that list, I only really enjoyed the first two, but I also only actively hated the bottom three. The middle six are some variation of a soft pass for me. When I try to look back and think about the value of this line-up and what it would take for me to stab someone for a new game console, I'm having a hard time seeing this as a good deal. The top games on that list are strong rentals at best. Some of them, such as The Raiden Project and Power Serve 3D Tennis, would be complete rip-offs at any conceivable price.

It should be noted that the only games on this list that could have exclusively been found on a Playstation at the time are Kileak ("kih-leek" for anyone who forgot), Power Serve 3D Tennis, and ESPN Extreme Games. That's a dire group of exclusives, but I'm trying to remember to not discount the value of having arcade games available at home so maybe those should count to some degree.

It's impossible to really place myself into the mindset of a hype cycle that I never participated in. The new hotness will always be worth buying for its own innate novelty if anything else. Long term success comes from whether a console can justify itself in whatever "launch window" the buying public will tolerate from it. I'm not going to pretend to be in suspense on the outcome here, because we all know that at some point this thing more than makes the case for its existence, but I can only hope that a few of the games along the way are still any good.

I'll check back in at the end of 1995 with another Round-Up to look at how the first holiday season went for the Playstation.

I never played any of these launch games, but can tell you this much. A friend of mine rented a Playstation and Twisted Metal from Blockbuster Video for a sleepover party, and we played that game all night. I wanted a PS1 sooo bad after that.

That and Tekken were probably the games that helped push the PS ahead of everything else.

@judaspete: I guess this is a spoiler for the next several installments, but I've been discovering that a lot of the well regarded early Playstation games would be fun as multi-player games but are kinda miserable when only doing single-player. Twisted Metal and Tekken are two of the best examples.

@borgmaster: Oh yeah, so much of the early Playstation years was about inviting people over to gawk at something that was more impressive than great. I liked how Resident Evil controlled at the time (to the point that despite being famously averse to horror, by Resident Evil 2 I was frequently contributing to fanfic on the IGN RE board...) but it was obvious most people were begging to come see it because it was impossible to believe it was a real video game.

And Tekken was in many ways the epitome of that. Deep down everyone knew that Street Fighter II was a much better game but there was something spectacular about how high Marshall Law's flip kick would make him soar and the audacity of implying those CGI cutscenes meant anything other than "the future of video games has arrived and it might be absolutely inscrutable" .

@borgmaster: That probably shouldn't surprise me. I put way more time into Twisted Metal 2 and Tekken 3 than the earlier games. Well, good luck. I look forward to your write-ups about them.

I bought my PSX around March of 1996, so not a day-one adopters, but in what would now be called the launch widow. The fisrt game I bought was NBA Shootout, that was an impressive game for the time. I had been looking at buying a Saturn console in Fall of 1995, but I think when I saw the early PSX playing Tekken it stopped me from buying a Saturn. I then waited a few months to understand what I really wanted.

However, that game that made me buy a system really was NBA Shootout! The reflections on the shiny parquet floor, the squeak of the sneakers, the announcers and even primitive by today's standards TV like presentation - it all just looked good. That game was easy to play for a novice too!

@monkeyking1969: I'll try to go easy on your nostalgia when I get to that game in like 3 months.

There were something like 5 basketball games within the first 9 months after the PS1 launch, which is insane compared to the way it is these days. I'm going to need some way to evaluate the shear magnitude of sports games for this system.

@borgmaster: Sports games coming off the SNES and Genesis era were so popular. I was no engaged with consoles games in that era, but everyone seemed to have at least a few sports game in their collection because they were rather easy to play...acting as default 'family play' games. I just lacked teh 16-bit experiences with most of them, but I loved my NBA Shootout game, it was at the prefects level for someone like me. And, while I never bought a full games I did like to play the demos of fishing games!

@judaspete:

@nodima: It was much later after PSX was well established, but I went over someone's house just to see his copy of Gran Turismo from Japan. I loved playing Rage Racer, but when I played and saw Gran Turismo it was like seeing robots do karate

Hey, i have a quick question for you. What resource are you using to have games sorted by release date. Im having trouble finding somewhere that will sort titles by release date. Thank you.

@thenoscollector: THAT IS A GREAT QUESTION. it's proving to be a pain in the rear finding an accurate North American release date for a lot of these games. There's twolists on Wikipedia that seem to be based on PSX Data Center, but there's little sourcing for those dates and I've noticed at least one date that seems egregiously wrong. On top of that, the dates from there can disagree with the dates in the actual Wikipedia page for a game and the release on Giantbomb. Some of the more obscure games and defunct developers aren't going to have reliable websites either.

So far with 1995 I'm just going off of those Wikipedia lists, but I'm trying to actually pin down dates for the 1996 games going forward. But unless I can find a scan of an old release calendar sheet from an EB Games or something, I don't think there will ever be a good answer.

@borgmaster: yea i am surprised how tough it is to find accurate info. A lot of places just list by title. Best of luck in this endeavor i will be following