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Sony entered the console business after a disc partnership with Nintendo collapsed, bringing straightforward three-dimensional hardware, inexpensive disc manufacturing and tools developers liked. The machine reached North America and Europe the following September.
A consumer electronics company with no history in games reorganized the industry within a single generation. Cheap discs, approachable development and marketing aimed at adults moved games decisively out of the toy aisle, and the platform economics established here shaped every console business that came afterward.
The first Electronic Entertainment Expo opened in Los Angeles, giving games a professional trade show instead of a corner of a consumer electronics event. It became the industry's fixed announcement date for more than twenty years.
Games acquired the institutional apparatus of a mature industry: a trade show of their own, a fixed annual news cycle and a venue where retailers, press and developers met face to face. For more than twenty years the event set the rhythm of announcements, launches and coverage across the whole business.
Square released Final Fantasy VII in Japan on January 31, 1997. Spread across three discs, with pre-rendered backgrounds and long cinematic sequences, it became the game that sold the genre to Western audiences.
A genre that had been commercially marginal outside Japan became a mass-market category in North America and Europe on the strength of one release. It also demonstrated what optical storage was actually for, and turned cinematic presentation into an expectation rather than a novelty.
Sony's second console reached Japanese buyers on March 4, 2000. It played original PlayStation discs, doubled as a DVD player at a competitive price, and went on to become the best-selling home console ever made.
Bundling a media player with a game console changed the argument a family had to make about buying one. It also demonstrated the value of carrying a previous generation's library forward, and it set an installed-base record that shaped where developers spent their money for most of the decade.
Sony's PlayStation Portable reached North American stores on March 24, 2005. A wide bright screen, proprietary optical discs and music and video playback made it the first credible challenger to Nintendo in years.
For the first time since the early 1990s a competitor took real share in portable gaming, and it did so by treating the handheld as a general media device. That framing, along with the later disc-free model, previewed how phones and download stores would remake the category.
Sony's third console launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, carrying a Blu-ray drive and an unusual processor. A steep price and difficult development tools cost it years before it recovered.
Hardware that is difficult to program for loses ground regardless of its theoretical power, a lesson Sony applied directly to its next console. At the same time, using a games machine to win a consumer format war proved effective twice, showing how console installed bases influence markets well beyond games.
A short game about walking toward a distant mountain paired players anonymously, with no names, no chat and no dialogue. Awards and mainstream coverage followed, strengthening long-running arguments about games as art.
A deliberately small, quiet game reached a large audience and serious critical attention, showing that emotional range and formal restraint were commercially survivable. Its anonymous cooperation model also became a reference point for designers trying to build online spaces that do not reward cruelty.
Sony abandoned exotic processors for ordinary computer components, priced the console a hundred dollars below its rival and stated plainly that used discs and offline play would work. The generation was effectively decided early.
Consoles became, in effect, standardized computers in fixed configurations, which lowered development costs and made multi-platform releases routine. The launch also demonstrated that clarity about what buyers are permitted to do with what they purchase can outweigh technical specifications entirely.
