It’s a household name now, but the PlayStation started as a risky gamble that Sony’s executives didn’t expect to perform as well as it did. But when the console launched to immediate acclaim, Sony soon had high hopes for its successor. While the first PlayStation grew out of a failed collaboration with Nintendo, the PlayStation 2 launched in North America 25 years ago as the highly anticipated follow-up to a beloved console, and it would go on to become the best-selling piece of gaming hardware of all time.
While rumors had been swirling for years about the PlayStation’s successor, Sony announced the new console in March 1999. At a Tokyo event for journalists, Sony revealed that the PlayStation 2 would be backward compatible with all existing PlayStation games, and offer a substantial performance boost for next-generation titles. At the core of the PlayStation 2 was the Emotion Engine, a Sony-designed chip that PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi said would allow games to not only render substantially improved graphics, but simulate emotion — a claim that was hard to believe then, and whiffs of hubris today.
