News Sony celebrates 20 years of PlayStation with exclusive PS4

I find it mildly interesting that he talks about developers, but not customers. Of course, it's only a quote from a larger speech, so not reading too much into it.

 

..OUCH!

Hmm, hip young things, I actually bought a PS1 to play Myst, Pah, no trendy Battle Arena Toshinden, Rayman or Ridge Racer for me, they were kids games, but Gran Turismo, Medal of Honor, Metal Gear Solid, now your talking, hard to believe it was nearly twenty years ago

 

In fairness, doing right by developers was a large part of what let Sony get their foot into the door originally.

Nintendo was historically antagonistic to developers, and Sega was rapidly becoming almost as bad.
Sony at the time was very liberal with what they would allow a developer to publish, and it made them popular with developers and publishers because you didn't have to fight through a lengthy and fickle content review process. Perhaps one of the best-known examples of this was Sega refusing to license an english release of the Saturn RPG Grandia because the western market didn't like RPGs, at the same time that SCE was PERSONALLY publishing the english release of an obscure niche title called Final Fantasy 7.

(Sony's reputation as a liberal licensor rapidly changed once the PS1 became THE system to have. Lacking viable competition, they became as hostile as Nintendo and Sega were. But that's a story for another day. )


They also offered a comprehensive C-based development kit that made coding software MUCH easier than the competition's assembly-focused devkits, making them the first to realize improved compiler performance and rising hardware capabilities had crossed to the point where coding on bare metal was no longer inherently superior. The newfound ease of development made them a very attractive platform to develop for.
Sega's Saturn, by contrast, pretty much HAD to be coded in assembly because it was a complex multiprocessor system and compilers of the time didn't handle threading very well at all. And it wasn't easy to write good assembly code for it because it was a complex multiprocessor system.

The Nintendo64 was... almost completely irrelevant due to how late it was to the party.

 

That PS4 is gorgeous. Shame they're not coming to Europe

 

I would have loved a PS4 shoehorned into an original PS shell. That would have been one of the best things ever.

 

PAH! And here I was getting excited about my only-just-less-than-common white model turning up in the post just now. :sulk:

 

That would of been pretty cool.

 

Oh interesting. Other sources seem to indicate EU availability is going to be limited, likely contests and the like.

If it's direct from Sony I'm massively tempted, despite us having two PS4 units already.

EDIT: It's the coloured PS logo on the main unit that does it for me. Far better than the single silver effort on the black units.

 

Twenty years ago I didn't own a console or a PC because I thought all that money, it would take to buy a PC, would be wasted as after two or three weeks I would get bored with it and it would just sit in a corner gathering dust. It was another five years before I got round to buying a PC, a few more before I bought a console.

The console is sitting under the TV, gathering dust, unloved.

 

The PCB from the latest PS3 might just fit

 

12,300 globally is going to mean an allocation of less than 5,000 for Europe, possibly more like 3,000. They'll go in an instant, no matter the method of allocation

Still, nice way for Sony to insta-sell more PS4s!

 

In Edge this months there's a whole section of interviews from Playstations people. The ones about the boardroom meeting the days after Nintendo's announcement are great, Kutaragi would make a brilliant ganster.

 

Its gorgeous, I really would like one of these editions to honour the memory of my PS1 back in the day!