What's Your Favorite PlayStation Memory?
COMMUNITY QUESTION | This week is the 25th anniversary of the PlayStation, so let's look back on our fondest memories of Sony's first consoles.
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Happy birthday to Sony's PlayStation! It's now old enough to rent a vehicle in the United States.
The PlayStation got its start in December 1994, where it launched in Japan with a lineup of games like Crime Crackers and Ridge Racer. Of course, its library eventually filled out with all-time classics, from Vib-Ribbon to Final Fantasy 7. Today, the PlayStation is still widely beloved and celebrated.
So for this week's Community Question, tell us: What's your favorite PlayStation memory? Whether it's personal, or just a moment in its history you remember very clearly, sound off in the comments!
Eric Van Allen, News Editor
For one of my birthdays—I can't remember which, only that I was fairly young—my dad rented a PlayStation 2 from the local video store for my brother and I to play. The plan was that we'd have it for a few days, and we got to pick out which games to play. Alongside Coolboarders and a few others, I chose Final Fantasy 10.
Now, I had very little Final Fantasy experience at this point. I had watched a friend play a fair bit of 7, and I'd played a Pizza Hut demo disc version of 8, but I couldn't tell you much about RPGs or the series history. All I knew was that it had been on the cover of every gaming magazine, it had a blue lion warrior that looked cool, and the graphics blew my damn mind.
If I had known more about how RPGs operate, I would have opted for us to rent a memory card as well. That short time with Final Fantasy 10 was spent playing the first few hours probably a dozen or so times, as long as we could before the PS2 had to be turned off. I can probably still, beat-for-beat recite the opening of 10, from its in media res opening to the Blitzball tournament in Luca.
We eventually got a PlayStation 2 of our own, I played all of Final Fantasy 10 thanks to the magic of Save Spheres, and it remains one of my favorite games to this day. But that early experience will always stick with me, pushing Tidus forward like Sisyphus with his boulder, before a pulled power plug sent it tumbling back down the hill.
Caty McCarthy, Senior Editor
I was a big PlayStation kid growing up. The PlayStation 2 was my big first console, even though my mom also had the first PlayStation. I consider it my first console because it gave me a gateway not just to the PlayStation 2's eclectic library, but all my mom's old games on the original PlayStation as well. I have too many memories revisiting those games to count, but perhaps the one I remember most was playing Resident Evil and Final Fantasy 9 on my own for the first time, where I literally never turned off my PS2 for weeks and just let it stand idle on pause when I wasn't playing. I don't know why my dumb ass did this—I had an old PS1 memory card plugged in. I'm sure my mom's electricity bill was insane. Sorry mom!