It’s been quite a few years now since they invented widescreen-format television. It’s the connoisseur’s choice, more expensive and more desirable, but it’s still vastly outsold in terms of new-TV purchases by boring old 4:3 format screens, so the large majority of shows are still made for the older standard. Similarly, DVD offers a far superior experience to that of VHS, and consumer takeup of it has been relatively high, but there are still far more releases, both everyday catalogue stuff and triple-A blockbuster material, on tape than on the new discs. And in both of these cases, of course, that’s exactly what you’d expect to happen. After all, what kind of boneheaded idiot industry would seek to alienate and exclude the vast majority of its customers the second it came up with some new gadget? That, dear viewers, is what we in the journalistic trade (as, indeed, everyone else does) call a rhetorical question.

One of the things that would have surprised even a relatively worldly-wise observer of the world videogames industry (but one who’d perhaps been away for an extended holiday and had become rather out of touch) over the last couple of years has been the indecent haste with which the business has rushed to abandon its all-time most successful format. The Playstation is almost single-handedly responsible for the games industry being the size it is today, and without its enormous popularity with the game-buying public, it’s a safe bet to say there would be an awful lot less of you reading this feature in CTW today (as opposed to Plastic Tat And Cheap Batteries Provincial Market Trader Weekly, say). But how have we chosen to exploit this popularity? By dumping the PSone and its tens of millions of owners like a cheap wine-bar Lothario the minute something better came along.

The games industry as a whole chose to stop developing triple-A Playstation titles somewhere over two years ago, despite the fact that there was nothing actually in existence to replace the cash cow that was generating what were for many firms the last profits they ever posted. Sega’s Dreamcast was on the horizon, but it didn’t take a genius to spot that the platform was heading for stormy waters. Poor third-party support, the tell-tale refusal of EA to jump aboard, and terrible financial difficulties at Sega itself – compounded by ridiculous decisions like the football-team sponsorships – all added up to forewarn anyone with their eyes open of one of the most predictable failures in games-market history. Most companies had abandoned the N64 long before (if they’d ever gotten involved with it in the first place), and hell, none of us needs to hear about the nightmarish minefield of the PC market again, which only leaves the PS as a source of income throughout what even then everyone was calling a "transitional period". So what was actually going through their minds when they decided to give up on greenlighting any new PSone projects and devote all their resources to a console that might never have such a market, and even if it did probably wouldn’t do so for at least five years? Let’s study some of the possibilities.

POSSIBILITY ONE
"Everyone else has given up on videogame hardware, therefore the PS2 will have a guaranteed monopoly on the games market of the future."

To be fair, there was – briefly at least - a certain amount of grounds for belief in this one. Xbox was still at the rumour stage, and Nintendo were making definite sounds about perhaps giving up on making consoles after the relative failure of the N64, so it looked for a little while that Sony, with the field to itself, would be the clear horse to back. But on closer scrutiny, this view makes less sense. The noise coming from Microsoft was far too loud to have nothing behind it, and Hiroshi Yamauchi is a notoriously wily old geezer whose public pronouncements have always been most advisedly taken with a liberal sumo-esque casting of salt around the combat arena. In any event, though, even the most cursory glance backwards showed that the PS, while by this point a runaway hit, had taken a pretty long time to reach that peak. With the PS2’s onboard DVD, it was always likely to be priced beyond the mass market for longer than its predecessor. (And sure enough, we’re now well into the format’s second year, still with no significant price cuts on the horizon.) Even at the start of 1999, then, it was pretty obvious to anyone that the PSone would still be leading the market for years to come. (See ONE STOP FACT SHOP.)

POSSIBILITY TWO
"The astonishing power of the Emotion Engine will cause consumers to beseige retail on levels previously only dreamed of when they see how it bends the very fabric of the universe to its mighty will."

Again, though it’s difficult to believe it now, there was at least to some extent a genuine feeling a couple of years ago that the PS2 was going to offer truly groundbreaking power which would utterly transform gaming rather than, for example, bring us exactly the same games again but with several extra shades of black on the tyre textures. Sony, after all, were still most of the industry’s idea of Santa Claus and God combined, and only heretics would doubt their word. But since the people making the decisions to develop for PS2 instead of PSone were the people who, by and large, already had their dev kits, there’s little excuse for their not being more aware of what the machine could and couldn’t actually do. The PS2’s limitations (most notoriously the lack of anti-aliasing, which even now leaves most PS2 games looking inferior to their DC counterparts) were well documented almost from day one, so it ought to have been clear that mainstream punters weren’t going to kill their own grandmothers on an unprecedented scale for the hardware.

POSSIBILITY THREE
"We’re big stupid idiots. Let’s do something really stupid. Durrr."

The most damning thing about all of this, however, it’s that it’s not just a case of being clever with the benefit of hindsight. The briefest of looks at the existing sales graphs provides a pretty clear illustration of where the industry’s priorities should have lain at the fateful moment of decision after Christmas 1998.

PS GAMES SELLING OVER 100,000 COPIES IN:

1996: 1

1997: 5

1998: 25

1999: 29

2000: 20

Right there, in just one bare stat, lies the evidence of both (a) how long it takes for game sales to take off after the release of even a massively successful a platform, and (b) just how well the PSone’s figures have held up despite the disappearance of triple-A titles from the schedules (the proportion of full-price to budget games in these figures hasn’t changed to any great degree since the introduction of the Platinum range in 1998, incidentally, and Platinum titles accounted for just nine of that 25). Now, at the start of 1999 publishers clearly only had access to the first three of these, but it still takes some kind of lunatic to go "Ah, a 500% increase in 100K sellers last year, after a 500% increase the year before – that’s a format on the way out if ever I saw one". The current PS full-price Top 20 contains eight games – all released in the last 10 months - with cumulative sales over 100,000 (even though most are either (a) second or third sequels, (b) total shit, or (c) both, proving just how desperate PSone owners are to give us their money if only we’d let them). The PS2 Top 20 contains none*.