Sony was very reluctant to join in on the growing games industry initially, however it became more apparent that it was a fast growing area in the electronics world.
They first teamed up with Nintendo, Sony coming up with a whole new format for games to play on. However after Nintendo suddenly backed out of the deal; instead of simply leaving the idea of joining in on the gaming market, they eventually released their first console; the playstation 1 in the mid 90's.
The playstation 1 was a massively popular console being the the first console to reach the 100 million mark in sales. And is also the fourth best selling console of all time. The first concepts for the playstation one date back to the later 1980s, it was the first console to use the disk technology, moving the decade from the age of cartridges. There was a variety of changes made to the Playstation over the years, for instrance the biggest change being the amount of ports on the back of the console; others being the simplified wiring and a relocation of the CD drive and also making it so there was less reading problems for the console.
Their second home console, the playstation 2, was announced in 1999; later released in 2000 in Japan and then later in the same year, was released to North America and Europe. This is the most popular console of all time; it was pretty much considered an instant classic. Even after the release of the Playstation 3, this system was still running strong after a few years. Within the first week of the PS2's release it reached over 900 000 sales. The PS2 had backwards compatability with Playstation 1 games; controllers and memory cards, CDs and also DVDs also worked on the system.The move Sony made to allow this backwards compatability massivly helped the sales for the console, and allowed a larger library of games for the PS2 to develop; it also enhanced the PS1 games on the PS2
A couple of years into it's release, the Dreamcast by Sega started to use online play with their consoles, Sony didn't play much focus on this until the Xbox was released, taking note that online was the future for gaming. An online adapter was released to allow this.
There was wide criticism that the earlier models of the Playstation 2 having faulty disc readers, the reader was suffering from the constantly misaligning laser disc lens.
In the late 2004 Sony brought out a smaller ps2 model, they stopped production of the older model to empty the stock.
There are over 1300 titles in North America and well over double that in Asia.
The sucessor of the Playstation 2, which is still currently active in the market is the Playstation 3. It was announced in 2006, and released later that year; having 60GB of memory. This was the first backwards compatible version of the console that could play Playstation 2 games, they later relased 2 other versions of the console the 20GB, 40GB and the 80GB. Both of the 40GB and 80GB, however were not backwards compatible with the PS2, but they were cheaper; which was an initial flaw with the release of the PS3. The 20GB PS3 was the cheaper alternative to the 60GB, still retaining its backwards compatability; this was discontinued in North America.
The more recent models of the Playstation 3, the 'slim' version, was released in 2009; it features a more compact, lightweight size and also runs more quietly in comparrison to its earlier models.
Variants of the PS3 models is quite broad, the original had 5 different versions: 20, 40, 60, 80 and 160. The 'slim' version having: 120, 160, 250 andd 320GB
The PS3 can also connect to Sony's first portable console, the PSP. (The PSP and other portable consoles will be covered in another post) Because of this connection, users can access their PS3 where ever they are, if they have a PSP. It shares a lot of similarities to the PSP, with the way it updates frequently and its layout.
The Playstation 3 is the only console to use Blu-ray discs for their games, also working in their favour in the market as the console doubles as a working blu-ray player.
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