It’s Christmas morning and I’m nine years old, sitting on the living room floor of my childhood home in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Even as an abstract concept, Japan doesn’t exist within the walls of my young mind. But as my younger brothers and I unwrap a brand-new PlayStation 2, shock and excitement lighting up our faces, all of a sudden, there’s a little bit of Japan in our home, even if we don’t realize it yet.
With this mysterious black box removed from its packaging, we can’t get it set up fast enough, furiously running the tri-colored heads of the AV cables through the living room cabinet and into the back of the television. We power it on and sit back in awe as the geometric startup screen of blue hues sings with a synthetic boom that none of us have heard before and have never forgotten since. We pick up the controllers, our one-way tickets to becoming lifelong gamers. Twenty-five years later, I live in Japan, and I’m still on that same gaming journey.
A Recipe for Success
First unveiled at the Tokyo Games Show in 1999 and released in Japan on March 4, 2000, Sony’s PlayStation 2 (PS2) was a force to be reckoned with for a few good reasons. Thanks to the Emotion Engine, a CPU born out of collaboration between then Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba, games developed for the system looked and performed better than almost anything else on the market at the time. But rather than just considering the future of their product, Sony made the clever decision to accommodate the past by making the PS2 backwards compatible. This meant that not only could it play games from its predecessor, the PlayStation, but the controllers from the original console were compatible as well, making the transition to new hardware easy and inviting for their existing audience. Delivering even further on the versatility front, the PS2 was also the first video game console that could play DVDs, which had risen to popularity right around the same time. Combine all these capabilities and there was little surprise when the console sold 1.4 million units in its first year alone. But the hardware was only half the story.
Through the PS2’s popularity, Japan’s video game development capabilities were on full display, beamed through television sets across the planet. Selling millions of copies each, homegrown heavyweights Square Enix put the JRPG world on notice with the stunning visuals of Final Fantasy X, Sony-owned Polyphony Digital delivered a new installment of their critically acclaimed racing series in Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, and with Hideo Kojima still at the helm, Konami published the stealth-action classic, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, to name just a few. A number of other successful video game series, such as Ratchet and Clank, Kingdom Hearts and God of War all began with initial releases on the PS2, further cementing its legacy as a proving ground in the long and storied history of video games.
After a production period of more than twelve years, the PS2 was eventually discontinued in 2013. During this time, the console saw a number of iterations, including a slimline version and a variety of colors that were released in limited quantities in different regions, perhaps the most iconic of which was the “‘Sakura Pink”’ model found only in Japan. To this day, some 25 years later, the PS2 remains the best-selling console of all time, with Sony having confirmed that it sold more than 160 million units worldwide.
Bold Branding
On paper, there was never any doubt as to the success of the PS2 during its reign. The numbers spoke for themselves for anyone who cared to look. But if the numbers spoke, then the advertising campaigns screamed. Campaigns that hardly ever showed the console and almost always shocked or confused the viewer with imagery that would likely never be greenlit in the modern media landscape.
From print advertisements that depicted a gamer’s arms bulging with veins shaped like the controller’s button markings, to a man whose head was a Rubik’s cube of exposed muscle and mismatched facial features, Sony didn’t hold back, which in a roundabout way, told the story of just how big they were at the time. Making the bold decision to advertise a product without actually showing the product in question is a luxury afforded only to the marketing departments of companies that are too big to fail.
But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the PS2’s advertising run was a television commercial known as “The Third Place,” and more specifically, the fact that it was directed by none other than the late David Lynch. In line with the rest of Sony’s PS2 campaigns, the advertisement never showed the console, instead taking the viewer on a short black and white journey of flames, floating heads and a talking duck, revealing only the stylized PS2 logo right at the end to allude to the film’s meaning.
A Point in Time
Naturally, a lot has changed in the decades since the PS2 came and went. My back hurts now, I don’t get to hold a controller as often as I once did, and the gaming landscape has evolved far beyond what anyone ever dreamt possible at the time. There have been numerous iterations of the PlayStation since then, along with competitors both domestic and international who have drummed up some respectable competition. But all that aside, the PS2, at least for many gamers of my generation, might be as good as gaming ever got, not only because of how successful it was, but when.
Although capable of rudimentary internet connection, the PS2 existed in an era before the online shop fronts and digital downloads that the world has become accustomed to today, which in a variety of ways, brought people together in real life. It was a time when like-minded enthusiasts, kept warm by communal excitement, would brave the elements and set up camp together on the sidewalk outside their local gaming stores, just so that they could be one of the first to play a newly released title when it became available at midnight. This same lack of online connectivity also meant that developers of multiplayer games were still building them with split-screen capabilities. A function that while today might be seen as cumbersome or even pointless, once ensured that the people you were playing with or against were sitting in the same room with you. Then finally, when a game was completed, rather than sitting uninstalled and forgotten in a digital library, its single use spent, the disc it had been published on could be given to friends and family like a good book, allowing for a shared experience through a singular piece of media.
Of course, these innately human interactions were not to the credit of Sony or any of its competitors. They were simply by-products of the technical limitations of the time. But by contributing so broadly to the culture throughout what is arguably one of the greatest periods in video game history, Sony and the legacy of their console transcends anything you’ll find in print. During one of the last moments when gaming brought people together in a literal sense, by many metrics, the PlayStation 2 did it best. 25 years later, I count myself lucky to have witnessed it all as it happened, even if at the time, I didn’t know where it had come from.
