The best-selling title at the PlayStation 2's Japanese launch was not a game. According to Shuhei Yoshida, who later ran Sony's studios, it was a DVD of The Matrix. Sony had built a game console, and the first thing Japan did with it was watch Keanu Reeves dodge bullets.
That was no accident. Ken Kutaragi had seen a demonstration of a chip that added games to DVD players, and the original PlayStation had made him powerful enough to overrule Sony's concerns about eating into sales of its own standalone DVD players. The bet paid off. The PlayStation 2 remains the best-selling video game console of all time, with 160 million units sold.
If you grew up with consoles that stream films as a matter of course, a black box with a disc tray sounds like nothing. In 2000 it was the cheapest way into the future, and the future came with a remote control sold separately.
Ten thousand people in a queue
Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in Japan on March 4, 2000, at ¥39,800. The papers reported scenes of "hysteria", a contrast with the quiet start of the original PlayStation in 1994. More than 10,000 people queued across Tokyo on launch day, and some of them had started waiting four days earlier.
Sony's bosses had predicted sales of one million units in the first week. They sold 980,000 in the first weekend alone, and online traffic was so heavy that Sony was forced to temporarily shut down its website. A black market opened in Akihabara almost immediately, with most consoles on eBay selling in excess of $2000 each.
The games were the weak spot. The console launched with eleven "underwhelming" titles, Ridge Racer V and Street Fighter EX3 among them, and early complaints about faulty memory cards even contributed to a dip in Sony's stock price. Nobody in the queue cared. They had a DVD player to carry home.
A DVD player with a side hustle
Here is the bit that sounds made up now. Standalone DVD players were still expensive in 2000, and the PlayStation 2 did the same job for much less, which helped make it an instant hit. In markets like Spain, Sony pushed the DVD side harder and the PS2 significantly expanded the number of homes with a games console. Parents who would never buy a toy would buy a DVD player. If it also happened to play Tekken, that was between you and your homework.
Your old games came along too. Full backward compatibility with original PlayStation games and accessories gave it a vast launch library from day one, so the shelf of PS1 discs did not have to go anywhere.
The bid that should have been $610
America got it on October 26, 2000, at US$299, and almost nobody got one. Sony cut its first shipment from one million units to approximately 500,000 because of manufacturing issues with a new, smaller version of the Graphics Synthesizer chip. Retailers who had taken pre-orders had to cancel many of them, and rumours spread that Sony was holding stock back on purpose to drive hype. One analyst put it plainly: "you could not get a PlayStation 2 in the US in that first holiday season".
The ones that did reach shelves made money fast. American sales came to $250 million on the first day, against $97 million for the first day of the Dreamcast. Electronic Arts sold 40,000 copies of Madden NFL 2001 before the console was even out. The PS2 stayed largely sold out in the United States until March 2001.
So the console went to eBay. One auction saw bidding reach $6100, though the 15-year-old bidder said he had only meant to bid $610, which was still more than double Sony's asking price. Another closed at $14,999. Somewhere a parent saw that bill and became a lifelong Nintendo household.
Rip-off Britain
Europe got it on November 24, 2000, at £299, and the reception was frosty. The BBC's consumer programme Watchdog criticized that price in a "Rip-off Britain" segment. Sony allocated only 80,000 preorders to Europe, even though Europe had been its biggest PlayStation territory, with 28 million original PlayStations sold there against 27 million in North America.
Release night was strange. Journalists went looking for the huge queues seen in Japan and the United States and couldn't find them, because there weren't enough consoles to queue for. Early resale ads asked for up to £1,500, though most units ultimately sold for closer to £500. Where stock did turn up, the scarcity led to fights, including at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
Sony made the ads weird to match. David Lynch, the director of Twin Peaks, directed a commercial for the PlayStation 2, which tells you exactly what mood the brand was going for.
Too powerful to leave the country
The chip at the centre was the Emotion Engine, co-developed with Toshiba and promoted as more powerful than most personal computers of the era. That reputation got out of hand. In late 2000, the American network NBC reported that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had acquired 1,400 PlayStation 2 consoles to use their microprocessors in missile guidance systems. The same year, the machine was reportedly placed on a list of sensitive items by the Japanese government because of its advanced graphics processing capabilities. A games console was on a list of things that might help build weapons. Playground status: legendary.
The other famous boast never happened. Everyone remembers Sony promising graphics as good as Toy Story, but the company never claimed such a thing. Its press release talked about "movie-quality 3D graphics", and it was Bill Gates of Microsoft who said his Xbox was nearing Toy Story-levels of graphics.
Buttons that knew how hard you pressed
The controller looked like the old one painted black, and that was the trick. The DualShock 2 added pressure-sensitive inputs across all primary controls, with 255 levels of pressure sensitivity on the directional pad and the face and shoulder buttons. Press lightly and you eased off the throttle. Mash it and the game knew.
In Europe and Australia, the bundled demo disc carried a free Yabasic interpreter that let you write simple programs on the console. Most of us typed something rude onto the screen and went back to Tekken.
The year it ran away with everything
Sony shipped 10 million PlayStation 2 units in its first year on the market. The original PlayStation took three years to reach the same milestone. Sega had sold 6.5 million Dreamcast consoles over a period of 22 months, and the Dreamcast was discontinued on March 31, 2001.
By 2001 the reasons to own one had stopped being DVDs. Grand Theft Auto III and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty were break-out hits, and Grand Theft Auto III's open world captured the attention of a broad audience.
The shortages came back for the slim model too. In September 2004, Sony revealed the Slimline for US$149, and in the United Kingdom a Russian oil tanker got stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking a ship carrying PlayStation 2s. During one week in November 2004, British sales totaled 6,000 units, compared to 70,000 units a few weeks prior. Sony fixed it by hiring Russian Antonov An-24 cargo planes to airlift units twice a week.
That's what you were holding
Go back to the black box with the DVD tray. The console was discontinued on 4 January 2013, giving it one of the longest lifespans in video game history, and the last game, Pro Evolution Soccer 2014, came out in Europe on 8 November 2013.
The PS2 got into a lot of homes as a DVD player and stayed for thirteen years as the place where a generation played. You had to be there to queue for a machine that people wanted for a film and remembered for the games.
