And a very nice retrospective from Polygon:
Have never owned one myself, but my older brother and a handful of mates did (and do), and the occasional gaming sessions with them over the years have always been fun.
Would love to hear the memories of dedicated PS players. First console? First game? Best game? Best co-op session? Your fondest PlayStation memories in general.
When we were kids my brother got a PS1 and then later a PS2 and while I did play the occasional game on them from time to time I was more into PC games then because that’s where the games I enjoyed were.
Later on when I got a job at BT Games, my one colleague was a PC gamer and the other an Xbox fan so I decided to take a gamble and get a PS3 so we could have one person in the shop for each of the major platforms. Little did I know what a good decision I made. I fell in love immediately and do this day I am still a massive PS fan (even though I do play on other platforms as well).
According to PSN Profiles my first trophy was for Red Faction Guerilla so that was the first game I played on my own PS console. The best game I’ve played on PS goes to Bloodborne hands down. There have been many, many other amazing titles but nothing can compare to my love for Bloodborne.
My best co-op and fondest PS memory are one and the same. This happened back on PS3 when playing Demon’s Souls (imported Asian version). Some random Asian dude, who clearly knew the game much better than me, invaded my world one night. We started off with the unwritten rule of bowing to each other before combat and pretty soon after that I realised I’m not as good in the game as I thought as he promptly proceeded to hand me my ass. Very quickly I ran out of healing items and since I didn’t want to die and restart the area I did the only thing that I thought could save my life (and souls) and I bowed once more. He stopped dead in his tracks, bowed back and then gestured for me to follow him. He then took me through the entire level showing me all the secret areas and standing back while I took care of the enemies (since invaders can’t fight mobs) eventually leading me to the boss fog wall. He then dropped a bunch of healing and mana items on the floor before bowing again and leaving my game. I’ll never forget that.
Love it @Wlad! Brilliant story and just the sort of thing I was hoping would come out.
So PlayStationers, anyone got anything as good as that in their PS memory banks?
I got the PS1 when it launched and was still in school and I can still remember playing all the demos to pieces because I couldn’t afford to get any new games. Does anyone remember the walking Dinosaur that you could open and close its mouth. And the manta ray one also. In the end I got one or two proper games.
My fondest memory with the PS2 was that it was the time when my now wife and I started dating and we would spend weekends playing Tekken Tag against each other. I can still remember her always picking Paul and Law and doing that annoying backflip kick of Law’s 
For the PS3 I actually decided to go the XBox 360 route as I wanted to play Fable and Halo, but my friend had a PS3 and every time we went to visit, which was often, we would play something. There were many braais with friends where we thought we were amazing singers with singstar singing along changing all the lyrics to afrikaans 
(I will go look for a picture of said events and post it here)
Then we currently have the PS4. It was a gift from my wife and it is now basically our entire entertainment system. We have our separate profiles that we play games on just so we don’t collect trophies from each others’ games Every day we get home we put on Netflix, Youtube or Twitch to watch stuff for the evening. It is my exclusive gaming platform for my streaming now for almost a year. We even ‘decorate’ our PS4 for Christmas by changing the theme to one we have that has a flashing tree in the background. It’s almost literally a part of the furniture
So all in all I think the Playstation has impacted our lives beyond comprehension, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I only got my PS One in 2000 after renting one intermittently at my local MR video since 1998, my was was my primary platform back then and the pc games did look better indeed but alot of the ps games were not on pc and apart from the n64 that were available but with practically no real catalogue of games here the ps one was the logical choice, primarily because it had soul blade on there which back then was the best fighting game i have ever played and still is one of the best games ever, i bought the game before i even got my console and i still have it in practically mint condition.
soul blade, ninja shadow of darkness, street fighter Alpha 3, spiderman and Colin Mcrae Rally 2.0 (which i preferred over the gran turismo games were my most played titles and i didnt have a memory card so i had to constantly unlock stuff over and over again and sometimes i didnt switch off the console in order to continue the next day with my unlocked items etc.
and after almost 20 years i still have the console and everything that came with it, i even got a memory card a few years ago, only the laser is acting up
i still have the demo one’s with the trex and manta demo’s and a demo one that came with the ps one which had a grind session demo on that i played to death
Used to play all night when we had sleepovers at my buddies house.
First game we ever finished on there was Heart of Darkness.
I still remember the day my dad took me to the store to get my PS1, I think I must have been about 8. Little did I know I was about to embark on a decades long journey of gaming epicness.
I played the absolute life out of that demo disc, Abe’s Odyssey, Kurushi, Overboard, Porsche Challenge, Hercules, T-Rex/Manta tech demo!
I could never even finish the Abe demo at the time. Years later playing on PC, I realised how ridiculously long and impossible that game really was.
Overboard was a top-down, seafaring rouge-like before it’s time, insanely difficult, but super rewarding to beat the levels.
The first game I got hooked on was Tomb Raider 2 and I’ve been a TR fan ever since. I’ve still never finished the game, that weird last level had 8/9yo me pretty stumped. I tried clocking it on an emulator a few years ago, but only got about halfway before giving up. Super nostalgic to play through it again though.
After that I remember my cousin and I staying up late on Friday nights (and sometimes on week nights, peering through a crack in the door) to watch my dad play Resident Evil 2. Many hilarious jump scares were had. Remember the licker jumping through the one-way mirror? 
Then I discovered a game called Civilization 2.
I shudder to think how many hours of my life I spent playing that game, I remember as you progressed through to the end game, the PS1 couldn’t keep up with all the complex AI stuff going on and it would literally take 10 minutes to compute one single turn. That never stopped me though.
Metal Gear Solid, My number 1 game of all time if you can’t already tell by my avatar. I don’t think I’ve clocked any game as many times as I did MGS1. What a masterpiece.
Man… so many games… FF7 & 8, Grand Turismo, Tekken, Ace Combat, Parasite Eve, Syphon Filter, Chrono Cross, Driver, Colony Wars, Crash Bandicoot, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis. A couple of those I got through trading games with friends at school, remember those days?
Remembering what it was like to play those games gives me all kinds of warm fuzzy nostalgia feelings.
Happy Birthday Playstation 
