Whenever Steve Jobs took to the stage to launch a new product, there is a theme, the variations of which he used to repeat. Now Tim Cook repeats it. It goes something like this, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Any company would be fortunate to introduce one such product. Apple has been very fortunate to be able to introduce a few of these into the world.” But it is not just Apple that has been fortunate enough to introduce such revolutionary products. Another company that comes to mind is the original ‘cool’ gadget maker. Sony.
While the Walkman is the most obvious product that comes to mind when we are talking about revolutionary products from Sony, there is another equally revolutionary product. The PlayStation. The gaming console that launched a million games and took gaming mainstream. Of course with a little help from Microsoft and its own Xbox console. But even before Xbox was a proof-of-concept, came the PlayStation. Way back in December 1994. Twenty years ago, precisely.
PlayStation came into a world very different from the one that we live in today. There were very few mobile phones around, Internet was in its infancy, Microsoft’s biggest block-buster Windows 95 was a year away and gaming was a nerd’s activity. Nintendo was the reigning superstar of the gaming industry and its 16-bit games. Remember Mario that came on small cartridges. And those nerd gamers who obsessed over these 16-bit games were a kind of marginalised group in the society. Tolerated but not quite put down.
When the PlayStation debuted into that world, it was a sensation. For one, it brought with it another great design from the then coolest company, and the company famous for the most outlandish designs, Sony. More importantly it did not run those 16-bit cartridges. It ran 32-bit games and came with games on little round plastic objects called CD-Roms. And for the first time, gaming went from 2-D cartoons that looked like they have been drawn by children to full-fledged 3-D environments in which people could move and participate in adventures.
In many ways, the PlayStation has been the puck behind which the industry skated. In 2000, PlayStation brought with it games that run on discs called DVDs that were capable of holding many gigabytes of data, before they were mainstream. In 2004, it came with Blu-Ray discs and was Internet-ready, before Blu-Ray was mainstream and before most people knew what broadband Internet was. In 2014, PlayStation 4 runs mostly from the cloud just as the new technology is going mainstream.
In the process, PlayStation acted as a stepping stone for early adopters of the technology and has helped in taking technologies and the games mainstream. The latter part is all the more important because by becoming an integral part of living rooms around the world, the PlayStation and now the Xbox have taken games from something teenagers play in their parents’ bedrooms to becoming bigger than pop-cultural entertainment like films and books. For example, the latest Grand Theft Auto game has grossed a ginormous billion-dollars in the first three days of its release. Where earlier there were games like ‘Tomb Raider’ that concentrated more on its heroines’ curves than on storytelling, now we have games like ‘The Last of Us’ with nuanced storytelling. The perfect game for the grey and beautiful 20th anniversary edition of the PlayStation.
Matham is a tech geek.
Follow him on Twitter @AdarshMatham
0 comments:
Post a Comment