Gaming's still cool after 20 years of thumb play

Graphics like Tearaway Unfolded on PlayStation 4 have kept old players loyal and continued to draw in young fans.

It’s two decades since PlayStation lit up screens and eyes.

It was 20 years ago this week that Sony created history with an ugly grey rectangle. They gave their little box a name that promised serious fun, the PlayStation, and they put a price tag on it that taught a whole generation all about the finer details of hire purchase contracts.

The original PlayStation videogame console, or PS1 in today's parlance, quite literally changed the game. It represented a huge evolutionary leap in consumer technology and heralded a seismic shift in the public perception of videogames.

Through canny marketing and a machine that more than lived up to the hype that Sony spent a lot of money creating, the PlayStation achieved the impossible; it made videogames cool.

I'm not talking nerd cool or geek chic here. I mean proper, actual cool. Fonzie cool.

There was the ample coverage in 90s style bibles like The Face, there was the bizarre advertising stunts that pumped the brand full of underground cred and there were the lines of artificially energised clubbers waiting for a go on the console booths in the city's most cutting edge nightclubs.

So while I vividly remember driving past hordes of real-life Grim Reapers haunting the major intersections of town in promotion of the driving game Gran Turismo and many nights eschewing the d-floor in favour of playing the one that was set up in Auckland's iconic The Box nightclub, my first actual encounter with a PlayStation was in the far less glamorous surrounds of St Lukes mall.

A big box appliance store had set one up near the front of store and what I saw stopped me right in my tracks. I'd never seen videogame graphics as impressive. I'd grown up playing Amstrad's and Amiga's and Megadrive's and was used to games consisting only of boxy pixels and clunky sprites. But this was revolutionary.

I stood frozen, watching videogame characters navigate the screen with lifelike motion while the camera swooped and darted and moved freely around the screen in entirely new ways. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I shouldn't have believed what I was seeing. The console was playing a demo disk that circled through various CGI animations and FMV sequences, with only the occasional bit of actual in-game footage thrown in.

And while technically it wasn't deceitful, thanks to the PlayStation's bleeding edge CD-rom drive the console was the only machine capable of playing these extended animation cut scenes, it wasn't entirely truthful. It would take a couple of console generations before the hardware could match the visual prowess these CGI animations promised.

But the demo disk had done its job. I simply had to have a PlayStation.

Sadly it would take at least a year of lustful yearning before I was finally able to get my hands on one.

The damn things still remained far too pricey for my sorry ass to afford, but I had a flatmate with a poor sense of self-control and no fear of a poor credit rating. I got home from work one day to find him sitting on the couch, controller in hand, grin on face. I don't believe we ever turned it off.

With the PlayStation Sony smashed the perception that videogames were merely child's play. Thanks to its radical marketing, the power of the console itself and its roster of ground-breaking games, like Final Fantasy VII, Wipeout, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Tekken, they successfully rebranded the entire genre as being something cool, something edgy.

It wouldn't last, of course. Gaming - the video part got dropped a long time ago - has never been bigger than it is today. But you can't argue that it's cool. Yes, it's a lot of fun. But that's an entirely different proposition.

It really is hard to believe that all this was 20 years ago. It's always such a downer to be confronted by age. In the comfy delusions of our mind I don't think anyone ever thinks of themselves as being old and busted.

Sure, we may abstractly acknowledge the hefty weight of our responsibilities, like the mortgage, the kids or paying the Netflix bill on time. But we don't like to think we're past it. Despite myriad reminders, like creaky bones, receding hairlines or being invited to PlayStation's 20th birthday bash.

But let me tell you, nothing confirms that you're really getting on like choosing not to attend the party because you went out the night before and going out two nights on the trot is all just a bit much these days.

So, Happy Birthday PlayStation. And don't worry, no matter how old you get, I'll always think you're cool.