You run excitedly into the living room, your eyes are so wide your wife immediately gets up to ask what’s wrong. You stare at her with disbelief and excitement as you tilt your head slightly. “You don’t know what today marks!?” you say, a bit too loud.
She starts crying, and hugs you for a solid minute; “I can’t believe you remembered, today, twenty six years ago, was our first date.”
Yeah… right.
Today, one of the most loved game consoles ever came out. Thirteen years ago, out of Sony’s inexperienced loins came out a brand new type of device. A device that could read DVDs, a device that could play games and a device that would be forever engraved in our hearts. And even though the Playstation 1 was available for some time before this piece of technology came out, this was something new altogether.
This wasn’t pixels, this was true love.
The playstation was our joy and our anger (since you probably can’t count the times you wanted to throw it on a brick wall), it was the partner you would come back to after school (or work) and it would accept you without asking why you were smelling of cheap perfume or who’s the girl you were chatting up in lunch.
But most of all, the Playstation was FUN. That’s right. No, it wasn’t able to broadcast 3d images into space while making you pancakes, but it did one thing right. It ran games, and not just any games.
The PS2 ran LEGENDS.
One of the first few games I personally played, was Ratchet 1. One grimy afternoon I came into my friend’s house for some general thoughts about life, death and other important subjects (like that girl with the huge boo… you get the point). I got into his house and found him crawling all over the floor, and before I even got to making a joke about his missed medications, I immediately started crawling with him. He wasn’t actually crawling though, he was checking out the large PS2 box that was bestowed upon him by the heavens (and his parent’s credit card).
Granted that this was a year or two after the initial release, but it was still an exciting day in modern history. The day I got to play the machine that would replace my social life for a good few months.
And it was glorious, so glorious I plowed through Ratchet 1 in a matter of days in his house. We played, and played, and after some cookie breaks we got into the game again. I think he actually hated me for grabbing so much controller time.
After quite some time of parent-convincing and house-cleaning, I finally got ahold of my very own console. And after some more time that was spent in convincing my parents to buy me some games (“What!? I thought this thingamajig was the game!”), I finally started the newest chapter of my life. The one where I finished the best pieces of gaming technologies that were available then (Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, anyone?)
As a fat kid that didn’t have massive amounts of social life, I’ll tell you this: this was the absolute worst thing I could’ve done for myself short from injecting sugar into my veins and throwing my cellphone out the window.
And yet… it was worth every moment. Every smile, every tear and every breathtaking ending.