What was the launch of the PS1 like?

I don’t remember the launch that well, just that it seemed expensive at the time for me when it launched. None of my friends bought one at launch or in the first year that I recall. I’m also not sure when I first played one, I guess it might have been around 1996 when a friend rented one and we played Resident Evil all night.

I ended up getting one in 1997 for Final Fantasy 7 which I was crazy addicted to for a while, even coming home at lunch from school to play. I also grabbed Gran Turismo in the year that followed which was my next obsession even though I didn’t really care about cars much before then.
 
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I was only 9 at the time and don't remember much hype around the PlayStation until some of my friends got one with Tomb Raider when it launched, then Resident Evil soon thereafter.

I was much more hyped for the N64 at the time and was fortunate enough to have grandparents get me one for Christmas the year it launched, along with Mario 64, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (great game), Cruis'n USA (meh game even for 9yo me), and Wave Race (great game and hardware demo for adults around me at the time).

I was able to get a PlayStation used from a friend I think a couple years later. And while I loved it, I had more love for my N64 still. Of course that changed with the launch of the PS2 despite it immediately killing my beloved Dreamcast well before its Prime.
 
Someone on another site told me that people and publishers "immediately flocked" to the PS1. Anyone who was old enough to be there, what was the hype for the PS1 like? How would you rate the launch lineup?

They did. The thing is you have to look at the whole thing in context. Nintendo had shat itself with stuff like removing the blood in Mortal Kombat, Sega had shat itself with the Sega CD and 32x. The fabled SNES CD ROM never showed up (that caused Sony to make the playstation as they were the partner). The 3D0 was a flop, the Jaguar was a flop, the NeoGeo way outside of anyones budget. The time was ripe and CDs and optical disks were all the rage. The N64 was way down the line so the Saturn and PS1 both launched at around the same time. Due to the PS1 being vastly easier to work with (the Saturn was a cluster fuck) it ran out the door with more games, a cheaper price, and looked better. The Saturn did better at 2D stuff in general with the PS1 at 3D. Very quickly it was announced that several formely Nintendo only titles would now be PS titles due to the advantages of opitcal disks. And that was that, game over.

Keep in mind arcades were also still a thing then. But stuff like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter were meh on consoles with the SNES and Genesis, and the PC ports were utter fucking disasters. Unless you were on a NeoGeo you wanted to go to the arcade. Playstation and Saturn changed that, with actual quality ports that ran well, looked well, and the game play was good enough to pass.

The PS1 ranks up there with the original NES and Gameboy as a ground breaking type thing and we've still yet to see any system, or PC advance, that ranks up there with those for how much things changed so fast.

There's also the not so much talked about side things it did. For one the DAC on it was pretty damn good and at the time it was an amazing CD player and shockingly cheap for what it did (IIRC Sony introduced the concept of selling a console at a loss and then scooping up profits later on game sales). The OG units also had the parallel IO port on it to connect a movie CD player, multiple units for multiplayer, and it also had a serial port. We also saw some crazy remakes on it. Pic of some of my stuff.
 

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They did. The thing is you have to look at the whole thing in context. Nintendo had shat itself with stuff like removing the blood in Mortal Kombat, Sega had shat itself with the Sega CD and 32x. The fabled SNES CD ROM never showed up (that caused Sony to make the playstation as they were the partner). The 3D0 was a flop, the Jaguar was a flop, the NeoGeo way outside of anyones budget. The time was ripe and CDs and optical disks were all the rage. The N64 was way down the line so the Saturn and PS1 both launched at around the same time. Due to the PS1 being vastly easier to work with (the Saturn was a cluster fuck) it ran out the door with more games, a cheaper price, and looked better. The Saturn did better at 2D stuff in general with the PS1 at 3D. Very quickly it was announced that several formely Nintendo only titles would now be PS titles due to the advantages of opitcal disks. And that was that, game over.

Keep in mind arcades were also still a thing then. But stuff like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter were meh on consoles with the SNES and Genesis, and the PC ports were utter fucking disasters. Unless you were on a NeoGeo you wanted to go to the arcade. Playstation and Saturn changed that, with actual quality ports that ran well, looked well, and the game play was good enough to pass.

The PS1 ranks up there with the original NES and Gameboy as a ground breaking type thing and we've still yet to see any system, or PC advance, that ranks up there with those for how much things changed so fast.

There's also the not so much talked about side things it did. For one the DAC on it was pretty damn good and at the time it was an amazing CD player and shockingly cheap for what it did (IIRC Sony introduced the concept of selling a console at a loss and then scooping up profits later on game sales). The OG units also had the parallel IO port on it to connect a movie CD player, multiple units for multiplayer, and it also had a serial port. We also saw some crazy remakes on it. Pic of some of my stuff.
The parallel port enabled a lot of crazy things on the OG unit. It's a shame Sony got rid of it since that was the primary way people were dumping the BIOS.
maybe from a technical perspective compared to arcade HW but MK on the Genesis was the way for the mass population
It still wasn't ideal. If your primary experience was playing the game in arcades then it wasn't easy to switch between the two. I had fun with it regardless. Thankfully, the console versions of MK2 were closer to the arcade version than the first game was.
 
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The parallel port enabled a lot of crazy things on the OG unit. It's a shame Sony got rid of it since that was the primary way people were dumping the BIOS.

It still wasn't ideal. If you're primary experience was playing the game in arcades then it wasn't easy to switch between the two. I had fun with it regardless. Thankfully, the console versions of MK2 were closer to the arcade version than the first game was.

The IO port could write to RAM which enabled all sorts of fuckery including pirated games. But yeah I keep an OG unit and replaced the laser because it does have uses.
maybe from a technical perspective compared to arcade HW but MK on the Genesis was the way for the mass population

This is idiotic. No, not just technical. It wasn't just that the 16bit system ports were graphically and sound wise inferior they didn't play the same. Various combos and stuff didn't work, they were no where near the same. The PS1 sort of rectified this. It didn't truly get fixed until the Dreamcast which was based of the Naomi board that ran multiple Capcom and SNK games so the port was to the same hardware (granted with less RAM but that wasn't needed for fighters). One of the reason the Street Fighter series and other Capcom games are so good on all platforms now is about when SF4 released their arcade platform moved to the Taito Type X-2 which actually ran an intel core2, nvidia 7600, and windows XP. Which made porting everything vastly more simple even though all PCs have had their nuts cut off by abastration layers and other bullshit. So a 1 to 1 port is possible now, it wasn't back then. SEGA had an edge in the 16 and 32bit eras and also Dreamcast in that their actual profit zone was arcade hardware hence perfect Streets of Rage ports and others started to use it. Hence also why Street Fighter Alpha and Alpha 2 are vastly better on the Saturn than the PS1.

The 16bit copies not only looked like shit, sounded like shit, but they weren't remotely close in the gameplay either. That's why BBB or B3 (the precursure to EVO) was always done on arcade machines only, because it's not the same game. To this day most people who actually care about the game own the actual hardware. The console, PC, or even worse MAME versions are still widely mocked and laughed at! You'd know this if you were part of our community. There are efforts to clean up the MAME ports and push things through GGPO for us all to get back together but it's still a work in progress. But still everytime someone turns a real cab into a MAME cab god kills baby Jesus and a fairy.

MK got hot off the arcade as did SF and all the SNK stuff. Not the home system.

It's like you don't know what you are talking about. Here's some of my stuff I have multiple cabs and JAMMA superguns (google it) and I can dump BIOS and rom files from all this stuff and also helped break some of the encryption on some boards.
 

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I recall MK on genesis being a sort of turning point, where me and my friends stopped going to malls for that kinda action as it was "good enough" on home consoles, for a much cheaper price too. lots of great memories staying up late on the living room floor during sleep overs, duking it out in those "inferior" fighting games on our TV in our sleeping bags...

at least, I think that's what staknhalo was talking about. oh, and we were much younger kids too, didn't care so much it was lower framerate or even crappy at times. maybe the older teenagers noticed that stuff, and still loved shelling out coins at the arcade
 
A big part of the ps1 growth was how easy it was to throw a modchip in. I didn't know a single person without a chipped ps1. Free or cheap games galore.

I don't know how long it took after launch to have them, but it really pushed us to play ps1 vs the Nintendo counterparts.
 
A big part of the ps1 growth was how easy it was to throw a modchip in. I didn't know a single person without a chipped ps1. Free or cheap games galore.

I don't know how long it took after launch to have them, but it really pushed us to play ps1 vs the Nintendo counterparts.
With the I/O port you could use a Gameshark v2 or Gameshark Pro v3 to freely boot whatever you want. No need for a modchip. I loved this thing.

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There was still a way to do it with Gameshark CDX on consoles without the I/O port, but it was more of a pain.
 
With the I/O port you could use a Gameshark v2 or Gameshark Pro v3 to freely boot whatever you want. No need for a modchip. I loved this thing.

View attachment 465378

There was still a way to do it with Gameshark CDX on consoles without the I/O port, but it was more of a pain.
Yeah this. The OG PS1 had an audiophile grade DAC and you could write to RAM through the IO port. Nothing like this would be seen again till the Dreamcast and the OG PS3 and then it was all vanished.
I recall MK on genesis being a sort of turning point, where me and my friends stopped going to malls for that kinda action as it was "good enough" on home consoles, for a much cheaper price too. lots of great memories staying up late on the living room floor during sleep overs, duking it out in those "inferior" fighting games on our TV in our sleeping bags...

at least, I think that's what staknhalo was talking about. oh, and we were much younger kids too, didn't care so much it was lower framerate or even crappy at times. maybe the older teenagers noticed that stuff, and still loved shelling out coins at the arcade

Frankly if you had to "shell out coins" you sucked and should not have been playing the game to start with. Scrubs are going to scrub. You knew someone was shit at games when they played at home. Wasn't the frame rate, the game was not the same. Frame rate is PC bullshit nonsense arcade fighters are/were timed to a monitor refresh rate that enables combos, but not only did that not work the code changed so stuff that worked in the arcade did not on console, and again the PC version was even worse than the console one.
 
Yeah this. The OG PS1 had an audiophile grade DAC and you could write to RAM through the IO port. Nothing like this would be seen again till the Dreamcast and the OG PS3 and then it was all vanished.

I remember how audiophiles would get these just to play CDs. It was always funny to see the little Playstation on top of a crazy hi-fi stack of amps and crap.
 
A big part of the ps1 growth was how easy it was to throw a modchip in. I didn't know a single person without a chipped ps1. Free or cheap games galore.

I don't know how long it took after launch to have them, but it really pushed us to play ps1 vs the Nintendo counterparts.
IIRC local guy doing stealth modchips within a few years of launch. I miss my ps1 and I remember cloning rental games on dads shiny new cd burner lmao.
Ps1 was huge jump but adoption was slower. IMO the PS2 fat was the ultimate ps as the ps3 with the backwards compatible spec was an unreliable turd, I killed three, got a refund and spent it on a 1.3Ghz clocking 7970 beast and never looked back. I still play FF8 on my ps2 for nostalgia. It's so /comfy/
I do need to get the fancy expensive component to hdmi converter these days, hard to get decent tv's that support 240p etc component.
 
With the I/O port you could use a Gameshark v2 or Gameshark Pro v3 to freely boot whatever you want. No need for a modchip. I loved this thing.

View attachment 465378

There was still a way to do it with Gameshark CDX on consoles without the I/O port, but it was more of a pain.
I had the memory card version, it wasn't perfect but worked usually lol
 
I had the memory card version, it wasn't perfect but worked usually lol
Ja, that was the CDX. You loaded the modified memory addresses by saving them to the memory card and using the CD as a bootloader.
 
IIRC local guy doing stealth modchips within a few years of launch. I miss my ps1 and I remember cloning rental games on dads shiny new cd burner lmao.
Ps1 was huge jump but adoption was slower. IMO the PS2 fat was the ultimate ps as the ps3 with the backwards compatible spec was an unreliable turd, I killed three, got a refund and spent it on a 1.3Ghz clocking 7970 beast and never looked back. I still play FF8 on my ps2 for nostalgia. It's so /comfy/
I do need to get the fancy expensive component to hdmi converter these days, hard to get decent tv's that support 240p etc component.

PS 1/2 multiout to HDMI is a thing. And honestly some of the PS1 stuff (See my pictures with Lunar, those are not cheap or easy to get) are gold.
 
I can just imagine you at the local playground standing there grilling kids in the sandbox "y'all ain't no REAL construction workers, f@#king pathetic!"

I probably way predate you in the FGC going back to news groups and shipping around VHS tapes to compare West Coast Best Coast to East Coast Beast Coast style way back in the 90s to get styles correct and come up with counters back in the day, players like Justin Wong weren't a thing back then this was the OG era very few of them/us are still around. Of the two I can summon up off the top of my head are Valle and Chen. Thing was the arcade was also the poor peoples gaming system because they couldn't afford a console, white bread Christian console players were a damn joke from the get go. If you learned to play on a game pad, GTFO and don't come back and we would beat your ass for showing up.

The PS1 era was the first that had close to arcade translations on the alpha series and MK3 series. But you could still tell the bitch ass boy who had a console and sucked total ass in competition from an arcade player in nano seconds.
 
Thing was the arcade was also the poor peoples gaming system because they couldn't afford a console, white bread Christian console players were a damn joke from the get go. If you learned to play on a game pad, GTFO and don't come back and we would beat your ass for showing up.
Ah, ignorant and racist. You're such a package /sarcasm.
 
so what are you like 97 years old then?

i remember kid no roll rock good me laugh kid scrub with rock me remember rock since big bang

calm down grandpa!
 
Ah, ignorant and racist. You're such a package /sarcasm.

Spoken like a noob. The fighter community has always had racial stereotypes that are very well known and lobbed back and forth for good fun. MK largely white guys who grew up on a console and suck and got bullied out of arcades and it's still the joke/scrub franchise of all of them. The Marvel Series is black people land (Mahvelll). King of Fighters is huge in Latin Americ and prepare for the burrito jokes. Tekken is dominated by Koreans. The community is still majority minority and look at the tournament winners, no blonde hair really! I'm white with blonde hair and I had a NeoGeo as a kid and I still get the inside baseball jokes about all of it. And if you think those stereotypes are bad you should see the jokes about furries and trans who play animu fighters like Guilty Gear. Open hostility was and still is a huge part of it. Intimidating people at the arcade down to physical altrications was a thing as well. And money bets which are always won when a console player showed up (and they were always white and suburban) was an on going prank gag.

Complaining about bitch ass white kids to fighting gamers is like complaining about gore in Mortal Kombat or Chun Li ass and thighs in Street Fighter. To this day curb stomping a white guy in a fighter can be followed up with "GB2 COD" and everyone will laugh. Also "GB2 Mahvelll" if you stomp a black guy in SF. Thin skins need not apply.

Then there is the massive issue. Lower income people could afford to blow a few quarters, but not the actual console and the game. And since there were massive differences between the console and arcade versions and in the arcade your money, a public mocking, maybe an ass beating, were all on the line you were playing a vastly more complex version of the game with higher stakes. Arcade owners used to let people in after everything else closed down and keep the lights on for hush hush money games where bets reached crazy levels. That didn't really change till the PS/Saturn era where you got quality ports and people didn't need to do that anymore. Even then I can remember being secretly let into malls in like 2008 to run illegal events with the lights off and dodging security guards. This was in the days where you could port data between a PS2 and a Namco Tekken cab (which ran off juiced up PS2 hardware) or even plug a controller into it. But even then, the moment someone plugged in a console controller and had pale skin ran up against a Korean who used the sticks you knew you were in for a laugh riot. Hilariously most MVC2 events were run off a Dreamcast because it had the same internal guts as a Naomi and the game was flawless.

You seem to not know crap about the evolution of things here and have thin skin.
 
yea sounds like you were from a different time or place. a "few quarters" omg when I was young it seemed like any game was 1 or 2 bucks for like 5 minutes of fun. yet you could rent a game for 1 buck for a week. the friendly joking sounds fun though. growing up in/near detroit nobody seemed to do that at arcades, everyone seemed to respect each other, encouraging the younger guys/gals. perhaps the rougher stuff went over my head, or nobody thought twice to mess with me (cuz I looked like a serial killer even as a 9 year old)
 
Spoken like a noob. The fighter community has always had racial stereotypes that are very well known and lobbed back and forth for good fun. MK largely white guys who grew up on a console and suck and got bullied out of arcades and it's still the joke/scrub franchise of all of them. The Marvel Series is black people land (Mahvelll). King of Fighters is huge in Latin Americ and prepare for the burrito jokes. Tekken is dominated by Koreans. The community is still majority minority and look at the tournament winners, no blonde hair really! I'm white with blonde hair and I had a NeoGeo as a kid and I still get the inside baseball jokes about all of it. And if you think those stereotypes are bad you should see the jokes about furries and trans who play animu fighters like Guilty Gear. Open hostility was and still is a huge part of it. Intimidating people at the arcade down to physical altrications was a thing as well. And money bets which are always won when a console player showed up (and they were always white and suburban) was an on going prank gag.

Complaining about bitch ass white kids to fighting gamers is like complaining about gore in Mortal Kombat or Chun Li ass and thighs in Street Fighter. To this day curb stomping a white guy in a fighter can be followed up with "GB2 COD" and everyone will laugh. Also "GB2 Mahvelll" if you stomp a black guy in SF. Thin skins need not apply.

Then there is the massive issue. Lower income people could afford to blow a few quarters, but not the actual console and the game. And since there were massive differences between the console and arcade versions and in the arcade your money, a public mocking, maybe an ass beating, were all on the line you were playing a vastly more complex version of the game with higher stakes. Arcade owners used to let people in after everything else closed down and keep the lights on for hush hush money games where bets reached crazy levels. That didn't really change till the PS/Saturn era where you got quality ports and people didn't need to do that anymore. Even then I can remember being secretly let into malls in like 2008 to run illegal events with the lights off and dodging security guards. This was in the days where you could port data between a PS2 and a Namco Tekken cab (which ran off juiced up PS2 hardware) or even plug a controller into it. But even then, the moment someone plugged in a console controller and had pale skin ran up against a Korean who used the sticks you knew you were in for a laugh riot. Hilariously most MVC2 events were run off a Dreamcast because it had the same internal guts as a Naomi and the game was flawless.

You seem to not know crap about the evolution of things here and have thin skin.
/sarcasm.
calm down eh...
 
Spoken like a noob. The fighter community has always had racial stereotypes that are very well known and lobbed back and forth for good fun. MK largely white guys who grew up on a console and suck and got bullied out of arcades and it's still the joke/scrub franchise of all of them. The Marvel Series is black people land (Mahvelll). King of Fighters is huge in Latin Americ and prepare for the burrito jokes. Tekken is dominated by Koreans. The community is still majority minority and look at the tournament winners, no blonde hair really! I'm white with blonde hair and I had a NeoGeo as a kid and I still get the inside baseball jokes about all of it. And if you think those stereotypes are bad you should see the jokes about furries and trans who play animu fighters like Guilty Gear. Open hostility was and still is a huge part of it. Intimidating people at the arcade down to physical altrications was a thing as well. And money bets which are always won when a console player showed up (and they were always white and suburban) was an on going prank gag.

Complaining about bitch ass white kids to fighting gamers is like complaining about gore in Mortal Kombat or Chun Li ass and thighs in Street Fighter. To this day curb stomping a white guy in a fighter can be followed up with "GB2 COD" and everyone will laugh. Also "GB2 Mahvelll" if you stomp a black guy in SF. Thin skins need not apply.

Then there is the massive issue. Lower income people could afford to blow a few quarters, but not the actual console and the game. And since there were massive differences between the console and arcade versions and in the arcade your money, a public mocking, maybe an ass beating, were all on the line you were playing a vastly more complex version of the game with higher stakes. Arcade owners used to let people in after everything else closed down and keep the lights on for hush hush money games where bets reached crazy levels. That didn't really change till the PS/Saturn era where you got quality ports and people didn't need to do that anymore. Even then I can remember being secretly let into malls in like 2008 to run illegal events with the lights off and dodging security guards. This was in the days where you could port data between a PS2 and a Namco Tekken cab (which ran off juiced up PS2 hardware) or even plug a controller into it. But even then, the moment someone plugged in a console controller and had pale skin ran up against a Korean who used the sticks you knew you were in for a laugh riot. Hilariously most MVC2 events were run off a Dreamcast because it had the same internal guts as a Naomi and the game was flawless.

You seem to not know crap about the evolution of things here and have thin skin.
Man, I even said /sarcasm. No need for insults over a joke. Was the tag not clear enough for you? :p
 
yea sounds like you were from a different time or place. a "few quarters" omg when I was young it seemed like any game was 1 or 2 bucks for like 5 minutes of fun. yet you could rent a game for 1 buck for a week. the friendly joking sounds fun though. growing up in/near detroit nobody seemed to do that at arcades, everyone seemed to respect each other, encouraging the younger guys/gals. perhaps the rougher stuff went over my head, or nobody thought twice to mess with me (cuz I looked like a serial killer even as a 9 year old)

Thing is you can adjust any JAMMA arcade machine for what it wants for money. You can also set any of them to free play. The way it worked on the east coast was you played a quarter on the cab to get in next. Stuff varied, but through the late 90s 25 or 50 cents for a play was normal. And most people could rail a beatem up or Gauntlet type game on a single pay. The best fighting game players could waste hours just chewing through people. You'd hunt down the best arcades and show up to try your luck against the best players. The biggest fighting legends (Justin Wong, Diago) all cut their teeth in arcades in that era. People wouldn't wear deoderant or shower to stink up the place as a tactic, stomping on feet and throwing elbows was common. I saw a couple guns pulled at times.

That changed with the PS1 which had actual quality ports and joysticks that were made from actual arcade parts. That whole thing lead to the amazing fighters on the PC now where the old fighter ports were, well.... uh... the console ports were better and that's putting it nicely.
Man, I even said /sarcasm. No need for insults over a joke. Was the tag not clear enough for you? :p

Sorry! Used to sarcasm tags being used for smarm and not actual sarcasm!
 
Anytime I have ever lined up for mid night releases there has always been BO in the air.

In the 90s this was a tactic though. People wouldn't shower for days before an arcade event, they'd stomp feet, throw elbows, and god fucking forbid you were a white guy the dick jokes and if you dared to bring a girl as a white guy she was 100% going home with someone else and that event would be up on usenet next week. It was all great fun. "youre girl is mine" was standard practice back then, also a riff on how bad MK players ranked in the community, hint they still suck.

Again though the PS1 era changed all that. To start with though CDs sucked ass at loading, the audio was much better. The storage space also let you port proper copies of say the alpha series where the SNES never had proper ports. Then you had shit like teken which actually ran of PS hardware and everyone dove the fuck in right away.

It's safe to say that the 32bit era was when home consoles caught up to or beat arcades and that's massive. The PS1 was a jaw dropping release and really hit it out of the park. It did take the "delayed" releases of FF7, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and SoTN to fully nail it down as the god champion platform but everyone know those were up for it when it launched. And bouncing out of of the gate with MK3, extreme games, Toshinden, and of all things Kings Gate the first Souls Game didn't hurt it. It's hard to dodge the PS1 and it's impact, for better or worse.
 
I only got into the PS1 when Metal Gear Solid came out. That game was huge. At least to me. I generally didn't give a shit about the PS1 prior to that. It was another 3DO, etc from my perspective. I had a SNES, the neighbor had a Genesis & Saturn.

The first console, at least from what I remember, that drew any real hype and media attention was the N64. That was the first system that EVERYONE wanted, and I remember how impossible it was to get one that holiday season. Playing Mario 64 the first time on our giant projection TV made my jaw drop. PS1 generally didn't do this, because to be honest, most of the games on it in the first year weren't much better than Saturn games.
 
if you dared to bring a girl as a white guy she was 100% going home with someone else and that event would be up on usenet next week.
How did you have the time and ability to witness this 100% with every GF at every arcade all around the world? Are you Santa Claus? God? Very impressive stat collecting nonetheless, I'll try to find my friend's GF on usenet or perhaps since you apparently spent so much time downloading all those images/videos, send me a copy? Thanks in advanced...
 
How did you have the time and ability to witness this 100% with every GF at every arcade all around the world?

What, they weren't girlfriends, they were girl-friends, and if they were there with you, they had a pager and a step-dad that would pick them up if anything went south.

You were their transportation to pre-beer associations, at least, legally speaking, and the kids you drove back from the arcade were only marginally related to your social circle. At most, you took them back to the bus line that worked past 10 pm. Also, those were dudes, because, like I said, girls had custodians.

Or proper *dudes.* And then you were just the guy driving them to hook back up.

Which, itself, was actually pretty cool.
 
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I only got into the PS1 when Metal Gear Solid came out. That game was huge. At least to me. I generally didn't give a shit about the PS1 prior to that. It was another 3DO, etc from my perspective. I had a SNES, the neighbor had a Genesis & Saturn.

The first console, at least from what I remember, that drew any real hype and media attention was the N64. That was the first system that EVERYONE wanted, and I remember how impossible it was to get one that holiday season. Playing Mario 64 the first time on our giant projection TV made my jaw drop. PS1 generally didn't do this, because to be honest, most of the games on it in the first year weren't much better than Saturn games.
I want to know what timeline you lived in because the media campaign for the PlayStation was absolutely insane. It was for every console that was coming out around that time. I agree with you, however, that the launch games for the N64 blew me away more than the PlayStation did. By 1997, though, it was all about the PlayStation.
 
back than kids were not as spoiled, most parents that had money bought it for themselves.
 
I worked at a Software ETC in La Cumbre mall Santa Barbara CA when the PS1 was in full swing and my god.. kids would roll into the store with 'rents in tote and drop 60 to 120 on PS1 games no sweat... the majority of it was sports related games... lots of times paid cash too.. the looks on the parents faces I will never forget lmfao. At some point I think brand new aaa titles went for 69.99 even.. crazy.
 
I worked at a Software ETC in La Cumbre mall Santa Barbara CA when the PS1 was in full swing and my god.. kids would roll into the store with 'rents in tote and drop 60 to 120 on PS1 games no sweat... the majority of it was sports related games... lots of times paid cash too.. the looks on the parents faces I will never forget lmfao. At some point I think brand new aaa titles went for 69.99 even.. crazy.
I don't recall PlayStation games ever going for that much. I do remember some imported titles that were low-volume in the US would go for $55-$60. N64 games were commonly sold around the $70 mark early in its life, though.
 
I don't recall PlayStation games ever going for that much. I do remember some imported titles that were low-volume in the US would go for $55-$60. N64 games were commonly sold around the $70 mark early in its life, though.

I remember Playstation games being cheaper than Nintendo games ($70 easy, in the '90s? and people complain about games costing too much today) but not as cheap as PC games, which were $39.99 at launch, $29.99 when they were old, and expansions were $19.99, all day, every day.

What a decade, and we were just kids.
 
I don't recall PlayStation games ever going for that much. I do remember some imported titles that were low-volume in the US would go for $55-$60. N64 games were commonly sold around the $70 mark early in its life, though.

I looked it up and apparently MSRP was around $50 - I remember $60 a game (probably store markup, but every place was then doing it cause they could in my area) - mainly why I got my system modded. Like I said, I got the console(s) bought for me by my parents, but then games were always up to me. I was a businessman doing business.
 
I don't recall PlayStation games ever going for that much. I do remember some imported titles that were low-volume in the US would go for $55-$60. N64 games were commonly sold around the $70 mark early in its life, though.
must be store markup because those new AAA titles were 59.99... as they aged a bit they would drop to 49.99 though. I just had this talk with my friend whom I worked there with the other night. funny.
 
FFIII (US version) was $80 bucks, I seem to recall. Worth it, and now my complete-in-box could be sold for $150 maybe.

I had a copy of Xenogears, probably bought in 2010 used for $20 bucks. Sold it kinda recently for $100 along with the PS1, had no idea it was worth much more... (not selling games after that mistake)
 
FFIII (US version) was $80 bucks, I seem to recall. Worth it, and now my complete-in-box could be sold for $150 maybe.

I had a copy of Xenogears, probably bought in 2010 used for $20 bucks. Sold it kinda recently for $100 along with the PS1, had no idea it was worth much more... (not selling games after that mistake)
$80 invested in the stock market in 1994 would be worth over $500 today.
 
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