10 Best PS1 Launch Games

ESPN Extreme Games was on the shelf the day the PlayStation came out in North America, September 9, 1995. Sony Interactive Studios America made it, and it takes the sports of the 1995 Summer X Games out onto city streets. You race skateboards, roller blades, street luges or mountain bikes from one end of a city to the other. On the way you kick and punch the other racers and grab cash, a lot like Road Rash. After each race, clips of broadcaster Suzy Kolber either cheer you on or pick your run apart.

Plenty of players got it with their console, and it sold. Roughly a year after release, it was the biggest selling Sony-published PlayStation game worldwide. When the ESPN license ran out, Sony put it back in stores as 1Xtreme, with every trace of ESPN removed.

The Raiden Project puts two arcade shooters on one disc, Raiden and Raiden II. Sony Computer Entertainment published it in North America as an original launch title on September 9, 1995. In the first game it is the year 2090 and aliens are attacking Earth. You fly a fighter that scientists built from the wreck of one of their ships.

This was the only console release of Raiden II, and both games come straight from the arcade originals. The disc adds a few things the arcade never had. You can switch between the original and a rearranged soundtrack, and your high scores save to a memory card. Players who still recommend it almost always point to Raiden II, the half of the disc you could not get on any other console.

Toshinden was the first original game from Tamsoft, an in-house developer at the Takara toy company. It came out in Japan on January 1, 1995, and in September 1995 it reached North America and Europe as a launch title. Takara bragged that its fights were more three-dimensional than Virtua Fighter's, where the attacks all happen on one plane. Every fighter has basic moves and special attacks, plus a desperation attack you can only use when your energy is down to around 10%.

Sony's American team promoted it as a "Saturn killer". That aged badly, since Sega itself published a Saturn port, Battle Arena Toshinden Remix, less than a year later. For a lot of players it was the first PlayStation game they ever played.

Destruction Derby is a racing game where wrecking the other cars is the whole idea. Reflections made it, and it reached North America on 16 November 1995. In the Destruction Derby mode you score points by smashing cars in a trackless arena called The Bowl. Stock Car Racing just asks you to finish first. The engine handles up to twenty cars on screen at once, and no console racer other than Daytona USA had done that before. Director Martin Edmondson insisted on simulated physics, because without them he thought the game would be "completely unplayable".

Critics praised the graphics and the car damage. Before release, writers at Edge and Next Generation even thought it could beat Ridge Racer. In 2023, IGN called it one of three "forgotten launch gems" of the PlayStation. The series went on with Destruction Derby 2 in 1996.

Jumping Flash! comes from Exact and Ultra, and you play it in first person as Robbit, a robot rabbit. Baron Aloha, an astrophysicist with bad manners, has scattered the Jet Pods, and Robbit has to collect them in every world. You can move Robbit freely in three-dimensional space and turn the camera any way you like, which felt wild on a 1995 console. It holds the Guinness World Record as the first platform game in true 3D. It came out in Japan in April 1995 and reached North America on 2 November 1995.

All four reviewers at Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it their Game of the Month award, and a year later it was in Next Generation's Top 100 Games of All Time. Bigger 3D platformers buried it later in the generation, which is a shame. It got two sequels, Jumping Flash! 2 and Robbit Mon Dieu.

Ridge Racer started in arcades in 1993 on Namco's System 22 board, the first arcade game with 3D texture-mapped graphics. The PlayStation version was a launch title in Japan in 1994, and again in North America and Europe in 1995. It is built around a trend among Japanese car fans, racing on mountain roads and drifting around the corners. The home version had to be made more or less from scratch and took nearly as long to develop as the arcade game.

Critics loved the graphics and the drifting, though some wanted smarter rivals and a multiplayer mode. Here is a nice detail: once the game has loaded, the disc is only needed for six music tracks. You could swap in any music CD you owned and race to that instead. It came back as a Greatest Hits release in 1997.

Wipeout is an anti-gravity racer from Psygnosis, set in 2052 in the F3600 racing league. You pick one of four teams, each with two ships, and fly over power-up pads to grab shields, turbo boosts and weapons. It was a launch title in Europe on 29 September 1995 and reached North America on 21 November 1995. The name came from a pub conversation and the Surfaris song "Wipe Out".

The music is what people remember. CoLD SToRAGE wrote the original score, and some versions add tracks by Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers. Critics praised how original it was and complained about the physics. Maximum said that of all the European launch games, "not one title can match up to the awesome nature of Psygnosis' WipeOut". The franchise has sold over 1.5 million units across Europe and North America, starting with this one. Wipeout 2097 followed in 1996.

Tekken began as a Namco arcade game, first planned for the System 22 board, the one Ridge Racer used, after Namco heard Sega was making Virtua Fighter 2. The PlayStation version reached North America on November 8, 1995, and it gave you more than the arcade did. Clear Arcade Mode with different fighters and you unlock the sub-bosses. Finish it with each of the original eight characters and you get a cutscene for each one. It was the first fighting game with full-motion video.

Guinness gave it the record for the first PlayStation game to sell over one million units, and it has sold 2.8 million copies as of 2024. Critics liked it, though Next Generation thought the graphics were its weakest point, with backgrounds that barely move. Players backed it almost exactly as much as the game one place above it.

Rayman is a side-scrolling platformer about a big-nosed hero with no arms or legs. He fights by throwing his fists and can hover for a moment with his hair. Michel Ancel dreamed him up as a teenager and later made him at Ubi Soft. Development started on the Atari ST and moved to the Atari Jaguar after the Super NES CD-ROM add-on was cancelled. Ubi Soft made it a launch title for the PlayStation in North America and Europe to compete with the Japanese platformers on the console.

Rayman became one of the best-selling PlayStation games. Critics praised how it looked and sounded, and some found it far too hard. Ancel said the challenge was aimed at experienced players. Players put it just ahead of Tekken, by a hair, which feels right for a hero who flies with his hair.

Twisted Metal is a car combat game from SingleTrac, published by Sony and created by David Jaffe and Scott Campbell. It came out on November 5, 1995. You pick one of 12 vehicles, each with its own driver and special move, and fight through bigger arenas against more and more opponents. At the end waits Darkside, last year's winner, in a large armored car that fires several missiles at once. The arenas are full of weapon pickups and repair stations, and also pedestrians and course stewards armed with machine guns or missile launchers.

Players named it more than any other launch game on this list, by a wide margin, and they usually recommend it together with Twisted Metal 2. It was among the popular first-year games that Sony reissued first as Greatest Hits. By October 31, 2000, the series had sold 5 million copies.