History of Sony PlayStation

In 1988, Sony and Nintendo were working together to develop the Super Disc, which was going to be a CD-ROM attachment intended to be part of Nintendo's Super Nintendo game. However, Sony and Nintendo parted ways and the Super Disc was never introduced or used by Nintendo.

In 1991, Sony used a modified version of the Super Disk as part of their new game console - the Sony Playstation. Research and development for the PlayStation had began in 1990, headed by Sony engineer, Ken Kutaragi, with their first release made in 1994.

The PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series of console and hand-held game devices.

The Playstation retailed for $299. By March 31, 2005, the PlayStation and PS one had shipped a combined total of 102.49 million units, becoming the first video game console to reach the 100 million mark. Its library contains almost 1000 games!

In 2000, Sony released a smaller redesigned version of the PlayStation called the PSOne (aka PSone, PSOne and PS1) that was both cheaper and smaller.

The PSOne is about one-half times smaller than the original PlayStation (38 mm × 193 mm × 144 mm versus 45 mm × 260 mm × 185 mm). It went on to outsell all other consoles, including Sony's own brand-new PlayStation. The PSOne is fully compatible with all PlayStation software. There were three differences between the "PSOne" and the original, the first one being cosmetic change to the console, the second one was the home menu's Graphical User Interface, and the third being added protection against the mod-chip by changing the internal layout and making previous-generation mod-chip devices unusable.

PlayStation 2 (aka PS2) is the successor to the PlayStation. It is backward compatible with its predecessor in that it can play almost every PlayStation game. This was done by embedding the most important parts of the PS one inside the PlayStation 2 design.

The third generation of the PlayStation is known as the PlayStation 3 (aka PS3) is backward compatible with nearly all games that were originally made for PlayStation.

The PlayStation 3 was launched on November 11, 2006 in Japan, November 17, 2006 in North America, and March 23, 2007 in Europe.

The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game systems. Learn all about the Nintendo Wii.

The PlayStation Portable (aka PSP) is a handheld game console first released in late 2004. It is not compatible with PlayStation games; it only runs games developed specifically for the PSP. Sony hopes to release nearly all PlayStation 1 games gradually.