PlayStation

This console really needs no introduction. When this console was launched by Sony in 1995 (UK Release), it completely changed gaming forever.

This was actually my first games console. Up until that point in time, I had always owned home computers as I preferred to mess around with stuff rather than simply sit there and play games on the TV. But these games were unlike anything I had ever seen before.

My friend was the first person I knew to get one, and when it turned up we spent the entire night going through the included Demo 1 disc and seeing what the future was going to bring. We must have spent a good hour just playing with the T-Rex and Manta Ray demos! I just simply hadn’t seen anything like it before.

We then started to play the game demos, and to this day, I still remember the pain that Battle Arena Toshinden left me in. We had no clue as to any of the special moves for the character,s so our fights mainly consisted of whizzing your thumbs around the D-pad and buttons to see Fo farting some sort of light orbs and completely obliterating his opponent. The following day, I awoke to find two giant blisters on my thumbs, which really bloody hurt. But after sticking some plasters over them, I was good for round 2 🙂

My brother was next in line to get the console so whenever he went out I was straight in his room playing on such classics as Wipeout and Jumping Flash.

For a time, before the PlayStation was released, I really wanted a Philips CDi. But thankfully, I didn’t have enough money to get one. I think I would have been pretty disappointed being stuck with one of those when people all around me were getting the PlayStation.

Finally, the day came, and my parents got me my very own PlayStation. I think it was the last time I saw daylight for several months. I used to take my console down to a friend’s house who lived just down the road, and with the help of the link-up cable and a couple of TV’s, we would have link-up games of Command and Conquer. We used to set ourself rules in C&C where we would agree not to attack each other for 1 hour to give us both a chance to build up our forces. Then once the hour was up, all hell would break loose. I remember the PlayStation used to freeze up for a while after we both selected hundreds of troops, tanks and other vehicles and targeted them on each other’s bases. Once it had thought about it, everything started to creep along, and the war would begin.

The next biggest memory was sitting at my friend’s house when he read on the internet that you could copy a game onto a blank CD and boot it on the PlayStation. We assumed this was a fake, but since he had a CD Writer, we tried it anyway. After a few attempts, nothing had worked, and he went back to his PC to see if anyone had actually confirmed it. I carried on trying, and then a while later, Ridge Racer booted up. I assumed that I must have put the original disc back in, as I had been messing around for so long. But looking around, I found the original disc we had copied earlier. It worked! We tried another, and by this time I had memorised the pattern of the famous swap trick.

Our next course of action was to run straight up to the rental shop and pick up a few games that neither of us owned. Took them back to his house, copied them and started building up the collection. I think this was the moment my collection obsession started. For some reason, it wasn’t about playing the games anymore; I was actually having more fun trying to collect them all.

Later on in the console’s history, the first modchips started coming out. I purchased myself a PIC programmer and downloaded the hex code from the net. Flashing the chips and then soldering them in place to our consoles. No more swap trick was needed anymore. Sony and the game developers saw the issue and started to put anti-piracy measures into the games. But this just made it more exciting for me. We would spend hours trawling the news sites, seeing the progress people were making on overcoming the anti-piracy measures. Once a game was finally cracked, we would apply the patch, burn it, check to make sure it loaded and then stick it in a wallet and more than likely never actually play the game. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this situation. When you have thousands of games in your library that don’t really have any value since they were not paid for, most of the time you just don’t play them!

The PlayStation still has some really great games, and there are a bunch of them I still play to this day. Wipeout, Ridge Racer, Jumping Flash, Parappa the Rapper, Discworld, Medievil, GTA, Point Blank, the list goes on. Just great games with a huge replayability factor.

I don’t think there has been another time in my life when receiving a piece of hardware felt that special.