Why did the PlayStation completely obliterate everything in its path?

[nebrazca88]

I only knew 1 kid who had a Saturn. and they were rich. everyone else had an N64 for the most part and some had PS1s

This makes me laugh for a couple reasons. The main one is because until 1998 or so I only knew one person who had a PS1 and everyone else had a Saturn. I know this is completely against the national trend but it seemed normal and honestly natural at the time.

Conversely in 1989 I was the only one around who had a Master System. It would take until 1991 until I met another kid who had a Master System. Everyone else had NES.

[Rickstilwell1]

I think the playable demo discs that they started putting out (in 1997?), especially the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine and Playstation Underground Magazine discs also did a lot to help make people interested in the games. Once you tried a couple levels of an upcoming game, you couldn't wait till the full game came out so you could play the rest. It's something I started to miss that I don't think they had anymore in the PS3 generation.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

Thought about this one some more, after the latest 3DO thread. There are several scenarios that could have happened to make the 32/64-bit generation turn out more like the 16-bit generation (two victors) instead of the steamrolling the PS1 did. The reason the PS1 was successful is because Sony did everything right.

The PS1 had 102.49 million sales, the N64 32.93 million, the Saturn 9.26 million, and the 3DO 2 million. That gave Sony a 70% market share for the generation. Between the PS2's 155 million sales, the Xbox's 24 million, the Gamecube's 22 million, and the Dreamcast's 9.13 million, Sony nailed down 74% of the market for its generation.

If the N64 had used CDs, it would have easily sold 60 million units or more, probably ending up neck and next with the PS1.

[Alianger]

-Sega screwed up too much
-Marketing and brand recognition, Sony were big on a global scale
-Nintendo went with carts and lost too much third party support. PS1 piracy got pretty common by the late 90s from what I've read
-Which ended up mostly on team Sony - Square, Namco, Capcom, Konami, Ubisoft, etc. and Core and Naughty Dog ended up sticking with it
-Gran Turismo
-The demo discs were a pretty big deal too, these were traded around frequently where I lived and got people both playing various games in multiplayer and excited for the full releases
-The pricing probably

From my perspective, a lot of people were still playing SNES in the first couple of years, and PC gaming was getting big too after Doom. Some were obviously waiting for Mario 64, Star Fox 64 and Zelda (personally I was in my early teens and Mario didn't appeal to me at the time but I liked the other two a lot and occasionally played Golden Eye too). It really wasn't clear who was going to win until maybe late 1998 or 1999 over here. I got mine in late 1997 IIRC, which was a great time to get it thanks to FF7, RE2, Tomb Raider 2, GT, Oddworld, Tekken 2-3, etc., and more great games to come.