The fascinating journey of PlayStation, the gaming console that changed video gaming forever 

Gone are the days when kids eagerly waited for weekend picnics or ran to play outdoors at the first chance they got. Instead, they are now spotted wriggling joysticks on couches and pressing the displays of smart devices (phones, laptops, TVs etc.) or staying hooked on to their PlayStation. Yes, that’s how far video games have come! But what was the game changer in this domain? The answer is PlayStation. 

Okay, so what exactly is the PlayStation? It is an iconic home video game console, often nicknamed as PSX, or PS1 or PS One, manufactured by Sony Computer Entertainment and saw the light of the day in 1994. In fact, the PlayStation utilised compact discs (CDs), indicating the video game industry's transition from cartridges and also was the first of new-generation 32-bits video games.  

Data suggests that as many as 102.49 million units of PlayStations have been sold till date, and the numbers are breaking records with each passing year. Since the mid-1990s, PlayStations have come a long way with significant technological advances. How has the world of gaming changed with the arrival of Play Station? What's the story behind it? Let's explore! 

The inception of PlayStation 
Today, the world credits Sony for the era of the PlayStation and other video games, but guess what, it was Nintendo that first attempted to launch PlayStation in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System-CD miserably failed but left all video game makers, including Sony inspired.  

In the early 1990s, Sony Interactive Entertainment decided to revolutionise the video game world by coming up with its own gaming console. This is when a Japanese Sony engineer named Ken Kuturagi entered the scene. He devised a design that forever changed the domain of gaming! He made a home video game comprising of five game consoles, two handhelds, a microconsole and a media centre.  

Deemed as the father of the PlayStation, the man who once created the ground-breaking SPC700 sound processor for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, ended up giving birth to the PlayStation in December 1994 in Japan. The following year in September, the PlayStation debuted in America, and the rest, as they say, is history. While both USA and Japan welcomed PlayStation with open arms, the video game console did have its share of critical praises and high-end sales.  

PlayStation and project ‘Dreams’ 
Since its birth, PlayStation have had many versions starting with PlayStation 2 in 2000 (best-selling home video game console till date) followed by PlayStation 3 in 2006 and PlayStation 4 in 2013 (created records by selling a million units in less than a day, and becoming the fastest selling console in history). The latest console in the series is PlayStation 5 that was released in 2020 and has been a sensation ever since. Amidst these additions to the PlayStation series over the years, there’s something else Sony did, particularly in 2015.  

To provide aspiring game developers, artists, and creatives with the resources they need to bring their own gaming concepts to life, Sony launched its project ‘Dreams’ during the 2015 PlayStation 3 conference.  

Sony was already ruling the gaming industry and with the unveiling of ‘Dreams’, it took a giant leap. Okay, so what exactly is this project “Dreams?” Turns out, it was a collection of artistic tools for the PlayStation 4 that was developed jointly by Sony and the British game developing company Media Molecule (famous for video game titles like LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway).  

As the senior principle designer of the game John Beech (based in Sony’s US headquarters) had explained, with ‘Dreams’, one can design their own PlayStation 4 games as well as other innovative consoles. Simply put, ‘Dreams’ allowed gamers to customise PlayStation 4 as per their own wish. Truly revolutionary, isn’t it?  

PlayStation and the advent of supercomputer ‘Condor Cluster’ 
Apart from dominating the video game industry since 1994, the PlayStation has also contributed in more ways than one. In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory in the USA connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles with 168 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and 84 coordinating servers to form a powerful supercomputer named the ‘Condor Cluster.’  Interestingly, a whooping five miles of wires were used to connect the consoles. Till date, this supercomputer created with the help of PlayStation 3 remains the only and the fastest interactive computer used by the US Department of Defense. How cool is that!