--- description: Sony's original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, 20 years ago today. title: The First Sony PlayStation Changed Everything About Gaming image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt374157ec503b5423/69876bdce53abaed7b4d63a7/sony-playstation.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Tech](/tag/time-section-tech/) ## Tech Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # The First Sony PlayStation Changed Everything About Gaming by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Dec 3, 2014 1:00 PM CUT  Wikimedia Commons by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Dec 3, 2014 1:00 PM CUT My first experience with Sony’s original PlayStation occurred almost a year before yours: in the display window of a Babbages in an out-of-the-way shopping mall in western Iowa. Babbages, many have probably forgotten, was a franchise named after [Charles Babbage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%5FBabbage "undefined"), the guy credited with inventing the mechanical computer, that sold computer software and console games back when you could still buy stuff like Peachtree Accounting in biblical boxes from brick-and-mortar outfits. I worked there during my last year of undergrad part-time, less for the money than to be closer to my hobby. My store manager was a connoisseur of the improbable, popping up with this or that strange gizmo months before it registered on the public radar. (this was the early 1990s, the Internet embryonic and everyone still looked to magazines for breaking info.) And so when Sony released the PlayStation in Japan on December 3, 1994, he imported one, told none of us, and dropped it in one of the store windows for fun. I remember reporting for duty and noticing a racing game running demo laps in that window (I had no idea what _Ridge Racer_ was at that point) and doing the equivalent of one of those cartoon double-takes. It’s doesn’t look like much now–you can see what I saw in the video below, complete with the world’s first Redbook Audio-caliber soundtrack–but pretend it’s still 1994, _Babylon 5_‘s just getting started, the original _Jurassic Park_ only hit theaters last year, and the best-looking game you can play at home is _Doom_–a first-person shooter that’s technically only 2D with a bit of clever height fakery. By 1994, I thought console gaming was in my rearview mirror. I’d graduated from a Super Nintendo to a Pentium computer a few months earlier, and so 1994 for me was _System Shock_ and _Tie Fighter_, _X-COM: UFO Defense_ and _Master of Orion_, _Master of Magic_ and _Warcraft_ and _Wing Commander III_. Many would argue gaming _still_ hasn’t surpassed some of those titles. But none of that stuff (including 1993’s _Doom_) looked half as sharp and smooth and visually grounded as _Ridge Racer_ on that crazy little from-the-future import PlayStation. 3dfx’s Voodoo Graphics passthrough card for computers was still years away, and seeing smooth, lifelike full 3D actually working in a game felt like watching a moon landing. I’d played Sega’s _Daytona USA_ at arcades and recognized the processing chasm that still existed between high-end arcade experiences and home computing ones: with _Ridge Racer_, the PlayStation all but eliminated that gulf, and it was torture waiting those subsequent nine months to lay hands on a U.S. system. (The PlayStation didn’t debut in the U.S. until September 9, 1995.) Nowadays I take 3D in games for granted. Figuring out how to represent plausible reality spaces (or various forms of _unreality_ spaces that take their cues from three-dimensional ones) has always been a stopgap process, a technology-facilitated march toward a kind of retinal verisimilitude that’s still underway. The medium’s only part of the message, and my interests shifted long ago from workaday graphic whiz-bangery to design facets like simulated intelligence and interactive rhetoric and the sort of compositional visual artistry so wonderfully expressed in games like Inkle Studios’ _80 Days_ or Ustwo’s _Monument Valley_. ### See The 15 Best Video Game Graphics of 2014  Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics. Sledgehammer Games/Activision  Far Cry 4\. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3. Ubisoft  The Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series. The graphics are so impressive, TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game. Ashley Gilbertson for TIME  Alien: Isolation Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work. The Creative Assembly  Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution. Ubisoft  Child of Light Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts. Ubisoft  Destiny Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio. Bungie  Mario Kart 8 Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world. Nintendo  Infamous Second Son Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink. Sucker Punch Productions  Monument Valley Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall. Ustwo  Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis. Rockstar  Titanfall Respawn Entertainment  Forza Horizon 2 Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere. Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios  80 Days Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout. Inkle  Tomb Raider Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006. Square Enix But in 1994, we were still dreaming of the world to come, one flush with sleek roadsters and smooth-framed race tracks and arcade ports that didn’t feel like downgrades from their souped-up, quarter-chewing equivalents. In late 1994, home computers were still ridiculously expensive, Nintendo’s [Project Reality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo%5F64 "undefined") was just a rumor and Sega’s Saturn was a hypothetical that had pundits twisting over its advanced but at that point developmentally esoteric architecture. Into that space Sony poured the PlayStation, a system born of a failed add-on deal with Nintendo (the original “PlayStation” concept was to be a Sony-developed optical drive for the SNES), and the first game console to eventually sell over 100 million units worldwide–surpassed only by the PlayStation 2\. Companies like Atari and Nintendo and Sega played crucial roles in gaming’s formative decades, but when it came to capturing the public’s hearts and wallets, the original PlayStation completely recalibrated our expectations. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3613610/sony-playstation/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3613610/sony-playstation/"},"headline":"The First Sony PlayStation Changed Everything About Gaming","datePublished":"2014-12-03T13:00:41.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:45:31.387Z","description":"Sony's original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, 20 years ago today","url":"https://time.com/3613610/sony-playstation/","keywords":["Tech","Video Games","Sony","Playstation"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt374157ec503b5423/69876bdce53abaed7b4d63a7/sony-playstation.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt Peckham","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/matt-peckham/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt374157ec503b5423/69876bdce53abaed7b4d63a7/sony-playstation.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"sony-playstation","caption":"","creditText":"Wikimedia Commons","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3613610/sony-playstation/","name":"The First Sony PlayStation Changed Everything About Gaming"}}]}] ```