The PlayStation 2 arrives as a console and a DVD player

What happened

The machine sold on two arguments at once. For players, it promised a large leap in graphics and, crucially, kept the previous generation's library usable, so a household upgrading did not have to abandon what it already owned. For everyone else, it was among the cheaper ways to get a DVD player into the living room at a moment when the format was still expensive. Households that had no particular interest in games bought one anyway and then, often enough, bought a game to go with it.

Developers found the hardware difficult. Its custom processor rewarded teams willing to rebuild their engines around it and punished those who were not, and early releases often looked worse than the promotional footage had suggested. Studios learned the machine over time, and its later years produced some of the most ambitious games of the period. The install base was by then so large that a title shipping on any other system was making a deliberate choice to reach fewer people.

Its commercial run was extraordinarily long. Sony kept manufacturing and selling the console well past the arrival of its successor, supported by cheap discs, a slimmer redesign and a catalogue that eventually numbered in the thousands. Lifetime shipments ran past a hundred million units, a level no home console had reached before, and the system remained a fixture in living rooms and rental shops long after the industry's attention had moved on.

The world at the time

DVD was displacing videotape but standalone players still cost real money in early 2000. Sega's Dreamcast had launched to good reviews and was struggling against the anticipation surrounding Sony's machine. Microsoft had not yet entered the business, and Nintendo's next console was more than a year away, leaving Sony with an unusually clear run at buyers.

What it changed

Sega abandoned hardware within a year. Every console released afterward was expected to handle video, music and eventually applications, not just games. The pattern of shipping a console that plays the previous generation's discs became a selling point competitors had to answer, and the machine's long tail kept budget game development alive well into the following generation.