I remember the launch of the PlayStation 3 20 years ago 19 and a half years ago. I was at the midnight launch in London, interviewing super tall man and Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison inside a Virgin Megastore. What a time to be alive! A homeless man hugged me when I left.
The thing that stood out to me most at this launch, which you must remember was months after the PS3 arrived in Japan and the US, is how people had this bizarre idea of what the console was. One person in the queue was adamant it was going to replace his laptop, which he’d sold to buy the new Sony console. An odd choice, for sure.
Sony had convinced people the PS3 was the console that could do everything, which people seemed to be into - not something that worked for Xbox during the next generation. Maybe it had to be positioned this way to justify its price tag, which when adjusted to today’s money equates to almost $1k for the 60GB model!
What are my main memories of the PlayStation 3 as a games console? The launch line-up was pretty terrible, especially if you already owned an Xbox 360. Resistance was pish, MotorStorm felt like you were driving boats, Genji was awful, F1 was F1, and the rest were games. I can’t remember a console launch I’ve been less excited for to be honest.
PS3 launch games in the UK:
What else? Well, it was a brilliant machine for fun party games. Buzz! (the quiz show series) was alive and doing well, complete with buzzer controllers - SingStar was there too if you were into Karaoke (I was not). PlayStation Move offered some top party games, too, generally working far better than the fancier but flakier Kinect on Xbox 360. I think this is an area that Sony really excelled at back then and something current consoles across the board simply don’t cater for in the same way.
Games, proper, so to speak, took a while to come good, with third-party efforts often feeling like the slightly rougher sibling for the smoother Xbox 360 versions. But the best games from Sony were spectacular. LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 3, God of War 3, Puppeteer, Uncharted 2, Last of Us, WipEout HD, Resogun, MotorStorm RC, InFamous 2, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction… there were a lot of classics. Just don’t talk about how Skyrim ran on the console!
Not everything landed high on Metacritic, but it felt like an era of trying - an era I think many would love to see Sony go back to now. Folklore, Tokyo Jungle, Rain, Starhawk/Warhawk, The Last Guy, Sound Shapes, Dead Nation… not just endless sequels or live service games.
The PS3 was also the last time it felt like PlayStation was one big ecosystem of games. My model could play PS1 and PS2 games, directly off the original discs. It felt great to have a console that could do it all, and it’s a real shame that functionality disappeared in later models. The PS5 currently only plays select PS1 and PS2 games via digital purchases or PlayStation Plus, and it’ll play PS3 games but only streamed. Not great.
So that’s the PS3. A flawed console but one that was home to some real classics that are still thriving today.
