Comment on The legendary PS2
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 days agoDon’t forget the Atari Jaguar. Pre-ps2 would also include all the sega systems, NES, SNES, NeoGeo, the older Ataris. Leaving commodore and Apple out because they were more PCs than consoles. I think that’s all of them but could be missing some rarer ones.
Jaguar, 3DO, and NeoGeo were like legends that in hindsight I’m glad I never got because they would have been disappointing most likely. None of them really blew up so only had a handful of games. Iirc most of the 3DO games were those live action ones that were more like choose your own adventure movies. Jaguar claimed to be 64bit but it was because of a technicality that was a bit of a stretch (something like it was capable of 64-bit math but it usually refers to the address width). NeoGeo was a system to play arcade games, so that might have been kinda cool, other than arcade games being the OG P2W platform because so many games were tuned to extract quarters rather than for fun.
There’s a retro games store I go to every now and then that fulfilled a childhood dream of seeing a sega genesis with both the sega CD (the bit above that might have applied to the 3DO definitely did apply to the Sega CD) and the 32x (which I think was decent but didn’t get popular).
The Sega CD might (this is more speculative than the rest so don’t take this as fact) have even caused the PS to exist because Sony and Nintendo were working on a joint console that was going to be CD based but then Nintendo backed out and made the N64 instead. Sony, not wanting to abandon the work entirely, then pivoted and just made their own console. It wouldn’t surprise me if the combination of Sega CD flopping plus their games not being very good and CDs adding annoying load time are what made Nintendo back out. It probably also helped Sony direct game markers towards better ideas than FMV.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s Nintendo and Sony, Sega has nothing to do with this. There are known SNES-based PlayStation prototypes. Nintendo then turned around and bungled the deal, consequently invoking the biggest gaming brand into existence.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I meant the Sega CD’s performance and reception might have been a factor in Nintendo deciding they didn’t actually want to bring their project with Sony to market.
That said, I looked at the actual timeline and see that that speculation was incorrect as the Sega CD came out in December 1991 while Nintendo backed out of the deal in June of that year.
Hooooly fuck @ the story, too.
Sony had completed a prototype but were positioning themselves to gain control over licensing and distribution of the disc format they were using, which made Nintendo think they weren’t going for a partnership but full control.
So at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony did a tech demo of their prototype. The very next day, Nintendo announced their partnership–with Philips, not Sony. This was the CD-I, another console I forgot about in my last comment (that also failed because of its focus on FMV games, including the only Zelda games for a non-Nintendo console).
Kinda interesting that this one story seems to contain both companies’ full gaming arcs. Sony wanting control over their software ecosystem but being hated for it, and Nintendo wanting to keep control and pulling surprise dick moves to do so. There were no good guys in that story.
Though back to the original point, it wouldn’t surprise me if the reception of all those initial disc-based consoles helped Sony steer away from shitty FMV games and make sure they had the great games library the PSX did have. But again this is just speculation that could also be based on an incorrect understanding of timing.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Check out also Psygnosis’ role in PS1. They had some superhits like ‘Lemmings’, were directly involved in the development of the console, ordered cheap test kits for it instead of custom workstations, made ‘Wipeout’ which singlehandedly changed the audience of consoles from schoolkifs to college students. Under Sony, they were the liaison with third-party developers and stayed semi-independent, publishing other people’s games. Until they were rewarded for all this in 2001 by being relegated to the ‘Wipeout’ and ‘Formula One’ series. (‘F1 '06’ was so goddamn hard that the player could straight up become a support driver and needed to do test laps and display consistency after that. But they lost the license to Codemasters the following year.)