Gamers crowd outside a Japanese computer
shop on 3 March 2000, waiting for the PS2 to
go on sale (AFP/Getty)“Backwards compatibility was a very cool feature,” says Oli Welsh, editor of Eurogamer. “It really helped
make a purchasing decision on a new console if you knew you would still be able to use your old games on
it. Unfortunately it set an expectation the games industry wouldn’t be able to meet. It’s been a very rare
feature on games consoles since, and will only really finally become standard when PS5 and Xbox Series X
launch later this year, 20 years after PS2 did it.
“Much more important to PS2’s success than backwards compatibility, though, was its ability to play
DVDs,” he continues. “DVD was a relatively new format at the time and PS2 was competitively priced with
standalone DVD players, but could play games as well. That made the purchase a no-brainer in a lot of
households.
Still, it was by no means an entirely miraculous device. Under the hood, the PS2 was notoriously tricky to
get a handle on. Developers found the vaunted Emotion Engine a nightmare to programme for. Which
might explain the underwhelming slate of launch titles, of which only snowboarding simulation SSX is
remembered fondly today.
“You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers,” is how
developer Cory Bloyd described coding for the PS2 in a Reddit post. “The first time you read the stack,
nothing makes any sense at all. The second time you read the stack, the third book makes a bit more sense
because of what you learned in the eighth book. The machine has 10 different processors and six different
memory spaces that all work in completely different ways.”
Sony, however, had learnt from the success of its PlayStation marketing campaign. If its PS2 launch slate
was wildly iffy, the pitch to gamers was laser-focused. It wasn’t just selling a console – it was selling an
entirely new vision of what gaming could be.
The resonances continue to this day. Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated 1917 , for instance, is essentially a
first-person shooter as reimagined by Stanley Kubrick. Video games are in the DNA of mass-market
entertainment and popular art. Without the PS2, that surely would never have come to pass.
“Sony’s marketing for PS2 was even more ambitious, really selling the idea of games as a cinematic,
emotional storytelling experience,” says Welsh.
“The games weren’t quite there yet, but almost. Over time, though, as the machine racked up huge sales,
the focus broadened into a very mass-market pitch, with family friendly software and poppy, non-traditional
stuff like Singstar sitting alongside Sony’s ‘cool’ stock-in-trade.”
Slowly but surely, developers got to grips with the knotty hardware. And soon the PS2, which created an