PlayStation 1: Release Date, Lineup, and the $299 Mic Drop
Nintendo stabbed them in the back. Sega laughed them off. Gamers? They cast their vote—with their hearts, their wallets, and 102 million units sold. Here’s how PlayStation conquered the world, one region at a time.
PlayStation 1 Release Dates by Region
The Birth of a Gaming Giant
Before the PlayStation, Sony had never set foot in the gaming industry. Paradoxically, if the console exists at all, it’s thanks to a betrayal—Nintendo’s.
The story behind the PS1 release actually begins years earlier, with a deal gone wrong. In the early 1990s, Sony and Nintendo were collaborating on a CD-ROM peripheral for the Super Nintendo. The project had momentum—a prototype was even showcased at CES in Chicago in 1991. But the day after the announcement, Nintendo publicly humiliated Sony by revealing a parallel deal with Philips, breaking the partnership without warning. The affront was total. Rather than taking the hit, Ken Kutaragi—the visionary engineer who would become the “father of the PlayStation”—convinced Sony’s leadership to turn that humiliation into revenge. Project PS-X was born from that wound: a 32-bit RISC processor clocked at 33.8 MHz, CD-ROM support enabling far more ambitious games than cartridges ever allowed. Sony no longer wanted to collaborate. Sony wanted to win.
Technical specifications were finalized in 1993, and the industrial design in 1994. The “PlayStation” name and the console’s design were unveiled at a press conference on May 10, 1994, though the price and release date were still under wraps. Behind the scenes, Sony was securing support from Namco, Konami, Squaresoft, and more than 250 Japanese studios, ensuring a solid launch catalog.
PS1 Timeline: From Betrayal to Launch Day
$299
At E3 1995, Steve Race—head of development at Sony Computer Entertainment America—walks on stage. He says a single number: 299. Then sits back down to a roar of applause. Minutes earlier, Sega had just announced its Saturn at $399. A hundred-dollar gap, three seconds on stage, and the fate of an entire console generation shifts. PlayStation pre-orders explode across the United States. Sega never recovers from the blow. In a single breath, Steve Race had sealed the PS1 release date in North America as one of the most anticipated launches in gaming history.
PS1 Day-One Lineup: Launch Games by Region
How the PS1 Changed Gaming Forever
By ditching cartridges for CDs, Sony drastically cut game production costs and unlocked orchestral soundtracks and FMV cutscenes never before seen on a home console.
With a GPU dedicated to polygon rendering, the PS1 brought three-dimensional graphics to the masses and paved the way for entire genres: survival horror, realistic racing, and 3D action-adventure.
The first home console to break the 100-million sales mark, with a library of over 4,000 games and franchises that became legendary: Final Fantasy, Crash, Metal Gear, and Gran Turismo.