Quote Originally Posted by gbpxl View Post
It's weird if you think about it. a company that never produced video game hardware and with no established franchises under its belt (Sonic/Mario/etc) absolutely destroyed its competition. All the consoles that came out between 1992 and September 1995 (PS1's launch month) were dead as soon as the PS1 launched.

I mean granted, the 3rd-party support was great, and I think that is usually what determines a console's fate but looking at a list of PS1 North American launch titles, it wasnt anything spectacular.

Was it brand recognition? It couldnt just be that it played CDs. there were numerous consoles that played CDs by this point.

So was anyone old enough in 95 to remember the PS1 hype?
I am old enough. To me, I believe it was a couple of things (though I personally went with 3DO then Saturn back then). First off, Nintendo did not have a 32 bit system in the ring. Yes the N64 was being produced during the PS1 lifespan, but not till a bit later. Secondly, Sega had lost a lot of it's market share from that whole story.

What hyped me back then was that it was a new console, by a well known company, that had never put a console out before. Couple that with how popular things like a close-to-arcade quality port of MK3 were. Then you had all these new franchises that looked great in the magazines (Resident Evil). I believe it just intrigued a lot of people early on and had the games and pricing to be super competitive.