Are we a bunch of Sony haters?

Sony also brought gaming out of the closet, so to speak. After five years of PlayStation, gaming was no longer geek-only. This did more than simply grow the industry (which it did), also changing the sort of games that are made.

Sony's also created more, better new franchises than Nintendo or Microsoft in the same period (to be fair, Microsoft is five years late). Gran Turismo had huge impacts on more than just gaming, but even the automotive industry (I saw a RC Skyline car at a toy store yesterday--yet who in the US knew of Skylines before Gran Turismo [no one]).

If you want to count stupid little innovations, you can also credit Sony for popularizing the Link Cable and dual analog sticks. And while they weren't the first to do disc media, they were the first to do it successfully, guaranteeing future consoles would do the same. Sony also changed the way first parties work with third parties.

Microsoft has done good stuff with their online, but the overall impact isn't as massive as what Sony's done, not even close--I remember pointing out a year or so ago that Gran Turismo 3 alone was more played than all of Xbox Live.

Ironically it was the success of Virtua Fighter in the arcades that made them push for 3d at home, at least according to that Kutaragi/Sony book(I forget the name).

I liked the early PS1 first-party releases. While not on Sega or Nintendo's levels, were still damn good at the time. No futuristic racer was quite like Wipeout, Warhawk was a massive improvement over similar games before it, Twisted Metal was innovative, Jumping Flash was a big step for 3d platformers(especially on console; I'm aware of Alpha Waves and Geograph Seal). Sure, these were done by developers Sony bought or contracted but it's not like Nintendo and Sega hadn't done that before. The PS2 and PS3 had weaker beginnings.

I'm glad the PS3 is so unappealing right now. Not because it's Sony but because there's already too much stuff to buy. I don't feel bad about not owning a PS3 because it's so not worth it at this stage.

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Originally Posted by kedawa

Up until the mid 90s, the console industry followed the arcade's lead, and there were 3D arcade games out well before the PS1 that were fully texture mapped with 60Hz frame rates.

Sony may have anticipated the shift to 3D, but they were certainly not behind it.

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Originally Posted by outRider

Sony did do one thing right (or wrong, if you're one of those people that still complains about the "death of 2D gaming"): the PS1. It basically kick started the consumer 3D hardware industry.

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Arcade and workstation hardware at the time was a lot more expensive than consumer hardware (at least 10x, probably upwards of 20-50x), and it still didn't do everything the PS1 GPU did, nor did it do everything in hardware. Sony did the 3 most important things in polygon-based 3D visualization (drawing and texturing, depth sorting, and T&L) at the same time, completely in hardware, at a consumer price.

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

Ironically it was the success of Virtua Fighter in the arcades that made them push for 3d at home, at least according to that Kutaragi/Sony book(I forget the name).

I liked the early PS1 first-party releases. While not on Sega or Nintendo's levels, were still damn good at the time. No futuristic racer was quite like Wipeout, Warhawk was a massive improvement over similar games before it, Twisted Metal was innovative, Jumping Flash was a big step for 3d platformers(especially on console; I'm aware of Alpha Waves and Geograph Seal). Sure, these were done by developers Sony bought or contracted but it's not like Nintendo and Sega hadn't done that before. The PS2 and PS3 had weaker beginnings.

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I remember this time period as well. Going from the Yoshi Island and the rest of the great SNES stuff to the PS1 was amazing. I remember going to a toy store with friends just to play Toshinden before the thing was released. Good times!

Once I finally got a PS1 with Wipeout, Tekken and Destruction Derby, I was HOOKED. My non-gamer friends were hooked as well. Sure the games look horrible now, but it was all new tech then.

While I agree that Sony got REALLY fucking lucky with the PS1, I cannot deny them their accomplishments. The PS1 truly brought gaming to the masses.

The PS2 and PS3 don't give me the same feelings. The negatives for these systems have been repeated over and over , but I do have early fond memories of the PS1 (before mine died on me) ;) I doubt any other console will feel so "advanced" or so new quite like PS1.

Sony came up with the dual analog sticks after they saw the analog controller for the N64 much in the same vein of Sony "creating" the six-axis controller after the Wii's controls were revealed.

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Originally Posted by outRider

Nobody thought of doing 3D on that level before the PS1 came along. Sega was designing their hardware to do very basic 3D so they could mostly use it for scaling and rotation of their 2D sprites and BGs. Nintendo wasn't even talking about a new system. 3DFX wasn't in the picture. nVidia was just starting, and had some simple hardware similar to Sega's.

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Actually Nintendo was actively researching and talking about their next system. Sony and Nintendo originally planned on co-producing a system. Their plans fell through and Sony went ahead and made their own. That's word on the street anyway.

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Originally Posted by Rico

Sony came up with the dual analog sticks after they saw the analog controller for the N64 much in the same vein of Sony "creating" the six-axis controller after the Wii's controls were revealed.

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If you want to get technical, Sony released their dual analog sticks before Nintendo.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lightStick.jpg

One of the most important things the Playstation did was make CG FMV widespread. Some of that stuff was mindblowing back in 1995, and Nintendo couldn't put anything in a commercial that could compete with FFVII's cutscenes. I think that did alot to convince the general public that gaming contained enough wow-factor to be worth their time.

Sure it had been around before, but systems like the 3D0 didn't have enough memory to stream fullscreen video of the same calibre, and Saturn's cinepak was wretched.

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Originally Posted by J2d

Let’s just ignore the fact that Sony puts out a huge variety of games with plenty of million sellers yea.

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Done.

Especially since that "huge variety of games" is primarily the work of third parties. Sony is the house that Square built, never forget this.

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

If you want to get technical, Sony released their dual analog sticks before Nintendo.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lightStick.jpg

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Well flights sticks have been around long before but technically you're right but in terms of the actual console controller sony has always gotten its ideas from nintendo.