you can observe Microsoft Gaming fall apart over the next 12 month.

I’ll never forget the PS2 US launch. I visited the US for holidays and landed just the day before launch. I thought I was going to be able to get one unit the next day if I asked in a few shops if they knew they were going to have stock. After my sister took me to a few it was clear it was going to be next to impossible, some were going to get as few as a dozen of them and those were already reserved.

But in the last Best Buy we visited the person I asked about the launch told me the same as all the other stores we visited before but said “you really want one?” And he pulled out his wallet and started digging into a bunch of papers and gave me a receipt of his own PS2 reservation at another chain (I think it was Electronics Boutique?) and said “keep it, I don’t feel like getting it now I’ll just get one down the road”, he didn’t want any money for it, we insisted profusely, even though his reservation had like 15 dollars already paid. I was so lucky.

That other store was doing a midnight launch, they even had police in the parking lot keeping an eye. Picked up the console with Ridge Racer V, Tekken Tag Tournament, Kessen and a 2nd controller if I recall correctly.

Good times.

What a great trip to the past this was. I'm sure this is the rose colored glasses talking, but I do miss how video games weren't quite so mainstream in the 90s and early 2000's. Launches were smaller but felt like much bigger deals. There wasn't wall to wall coverage of every game all the time, so you could still easily be surprised by one that you had bought.

Good times, they were. Good times indeed. (And we're still married, too!)

I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress, just better iteration.

I used to work for a Sony retailer in Scotland when the PS2 was launched, and we were all incredibly annoyed they wouldn't give us one to demo.

"But you sell TVs, DVD players, and audio systems, not games consoles, you won't sell any of these"

Well not if we can't demo it we won't!

Despite this being the prevailing attitude at Sony - "don't sell them in shops where people are already spending five figure sums on home entertainment" - it did really well.

The one thing where I think they really missed a trick though, was their 200-disc changers. They had a CD changer and a DVD changer, massive units (we had a DVP-CX850D on demo), that took 200 discs like the name suggests, plugged into your TV and audio system, and you could select which one you wanted to play from an on-screen menu.

I think they really biffed it by not offering that chassis with PS2 guts. Just think, you've got your library of films, audio CDs, and games, all in one unit tucked neatly out of the way. It would have been expensive but it would have blown the market apart.

And, like the CX850, it'd still be about 700 quid on eBay 27 years later.

>In the end, the console wars of the late 1990s were won by Nintendo, which built on the momentum of the Nintendo 64 by launching the GameCube in 2001, along with an arsenal of handheld systems

Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?

>The limited amount of storage on the cartridge means that the textures laid over the game’s polygons are blurry and often hideously ugly.

The cartridge storage wasn't the limiting factor here. The problem was the unified RDRAM memory architecture of the N64 which turned out to be too slow for texturing. Instead developers had to use a 4KiB bit of onboard memory which was just too little in hindsight.

I mean the PS2 was a bigger hit than the PS1 and anything Nintendo put out so that analysis wains.

The jump in graphics was massive.