As a gaming company, Sony has made some generation-defining choices. PlayStation’s bespoke 3D architecture, dual analogue controls, “two ninety-nine.”, hoovering up talented studios for a two decade deluge of exclusive content and PS4’s later three ninety-nine are just a few of many. Standing above all of these is PlayStation 2 and its built-in DVD player.
Of course, it’s a non-gaming function whose true relevance to the 150 million+ PS2 units sold is still open to debate. Moreover, Sony’s claims that PS2 drove DVD’s success may be a bit of an exaggeration. But its place in building winning momentum for PlayStation 2 is an accepted but often forgotten fact.
Video Context
By the mid-90s, video-tape formats had dominated the home video market for many years. First invading homes as a time-shifting device in the mid-70s, VHS, and to a lesser extent Beta, grew into their roles as ‘entertainment on demand’ devices with the rise of the video rental stores in the early-to-mid 80s. Other formats had arrived either too early or too late for the home video boom that followed.
Laserdisc was too early; there was no home video market at the time and it had no ability to record so the public didn’t know why they needed one. Capacitance Electronic Disc and its Japanese counterpart, VideoDisc arrived too late; everyone already had a VHS or Beta machine by then.
DVD arrived at just the right time in 1996. Television sets were getting bigger in general, home cinemas were becoming the common in affluent homes and HDTVs* were creeping into videophile living rooms. The upgrade in quality would be readily visible and appreciable by many.
*DVD is not HD, of course, but its progressive scan 480 lines looks a whole lot better on a HDTV than VHS does.
But DVD players were expensive to begin with. Decoding its MPEG-2 video codec in real time was not a trivial task and the chipset needed to carry out this function in 1996/97 was not cheap.
Aided by strong interest from buyers in the home video and PC markets and support from all consumer tech manufacturers, PC hardware companies and movie studios, DVD took off. The near-$1,000 price-tag of 1996/7 fell quickly as the public was willing to pay a premium to avoid rewinding a tape ever again.
Gaming Context
Long before Sony had announced PlayStation 2, the gaming public was excited for PS1’s follow-up. With an incredible first effort well on its way to a (temporary) record of units sold, people expected something revolutionary and trusted Sony to deliver.
By 1997 we knew PlayStation 2 would feature DVD playback and be backwards compatible with PS1 titles. By the time of its 1999 announcement at $299, the public was in a frenzy. Rumours about PS2’s extraordinary power circulated with the ‘Saddam buys thousands of PS2s for use with WMDs‘ being the most famous and dumbest.
With a wounded rival off to a promising start with Dreamcast, Sony would beat their chest about the superiority of their upcoming machine’s polygon-flinging engine. PlayStation 2 would be worth the wait.
The other selling point was DVD. In 1997, the thoughts of a DVD player built into a console was supremely enticing. Standalone players were still the bones of a grand and you could assume that PS2 would be a fraction of that. That announced $299 price-tag was still below a standalone DVD player in 1999.
By that time, when Sony were really trying to convince people to wait for PS2, the added excitement for the newfangled higher-density discs was yet another nail in Dreamcast’s coffin.
READ MORE: The Enduring Legacy of PlayStation 3
A Murky Detail
There is one myth and a few mysteries around PlayStation 2’s DVD player. Many retellings of the PlayStation story state that the PS2 was cheaper than standalone players at launch. This otherwise perfect, in-depth article about PS2 says the console was ‘significantly’ so. This is simply not the case.
Accurate numbers are hard to find, only fueling the misconception. Wikipedia states (almost certainly incorrectly) that DVD players could be found for under $100 by the end of 2000. The excellent America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound by Andre Miller puts DVD players breaking the $100 barrier in 2003, seven years after DVD launched.
Fortune magazine claimed ‘solid’ players could be found in retailers for $200-$400 in their November 1999 issue. Chicago Tribune reported in October 2001 that the average selling price for DVD player in July of that year was $192 – not the lowest, the average.
It’s likely that folks are confusing DVD/PS2 with Blu-ray/PS3. Even the more expensive $599 PS3 was ‘significantly’ cheaper than the first BD players released in June 2006.
A Moot Price-Point Now, I Suppose
Either way, DVD video helped PS2 gain crucial momentum before, during and after its launch. We’ll never know just how many PS2s were sold on DVD playback. Nor will we ever know how many parents/Santa Claus made the choice of PlayStation 2 over competing brands due to the DVD functionality.
READ MORE: PS2 Modding – A History of PlayStation Piracy, Part II
But we do know it built buzz around the system, gave children and teens ammunition when negotiating a new console purchase with their parents, and added millions of DVD video consumers to a market already exploding.
In addition, PlayStation 2’s DVD playback brought the console from the bedroom to the living room. And then back to the bedroom once a new DVD player was bought.
As physical video and audio media retreat further into the past, the idea of becoming excited by something like DVD playback or a console flying off the shelves because of it becomes more unfathomable to a greater percentage of gamers, let’s not forget this pivotal decision.
