We all know the memes: No games, giant enemy crab, the PS3 grill, Chad Warden, etc. For gamers of my vintage, these punchlines have been embedded into our minds like insects in amber. Sony's hubris leading up to the PlayStation 3 was staggering. And hell, why not gloat a little? The PlayStation 2 was an unprecedented success, dwarfing the previous unprecedented success of its predecessor. On the handheld front, the PlayStation Portable was the closest we had seen to portable console-quality gaming at that point, and the first time Nintendo faced any kind of serious competition in the handheld market. Sony's reign from 1997-2006 (their golden age as far as I'm concerned) is the stuff of legends. What followed was peripeteia rivaling that of any Greek tragedy.
Kaz Hirai claimed gamers would want to work more hours just to afford a PS3, but that wasn't quite the case. Following a less-than-stellar launch (in part mired by a shortage of blue laser diodes for the eponymous Blu-Ray), 2007 served as the 'morning after' for PlayStation fans who found themselves in bed not with a revolutionary supercomputer but a $600 Blu-ray player with a complimentary copy of Talladega Nights. With its hefty price tag, poor online service, and ho-hum launch titles, Sony found themselves tripping on multiple rakes and landing face-first in a custard pie.
The PS3 launch, to be fair, wasn't the worst of all time. The Sega Saturn was all but dead on arrival in America with its surprise launch and the negative PR leading up to the Xbox One caused a downward spiral for Microsoft's gaming division that continues to this very day. But a company as high on success as Sony was in 2006 made for a legendary spectacle in an age when the phenomenon of internet memes and virality was fully coming to form. In 2025, when shitty console (and game) launches are the rule rather than the exception, I don't think a situation as the PS3's would be quite as egregious (ragebait Youtube hacks aside). We are all slaves to history after all, and Sony knows this better than anyone else. Their misfortunes caused several planned exclusives to take the multiplatform route, including games like Virtua Fighter 5 (which didn't even have online capability for the PS3 port!), Devil May Cry 4, and - infamously - Final Fantasy XIII, coming to Xbox 360. It didn't help that Grand Theft Auto IV, instead of launching first on PlayStation and getting an Xbox port later down the line per series tradition, would launch day and date with the PS3 version.
Indeed the Xbox 360 was a tantalizing prospect for the 'hardcore' consumers, being anywhere from 100 to 300 smackers cheaper than the PS3 (depending on the model) with vastly superior online infrastructure and a hit to performance that was negligible to that of the technically superior PS3 due to the latter's obtuse hardware architecture. To be clear, the Wii (in a league of its own) and 360 were not free of criticism. The former was woefully underpowered and marred by an irruption of shovelware, while the latter had a console failure rate hovering around 30 percent (!), plagued by the infamous Red Ring of Death. Regardless, Microsoft and Nintendo were laughing all the way to the bank in 2007. Super Mario Galaxy was - and still is - one of the highest rated games on Metacritic. Halo 3 was arguably the largest spectacle of a video game launch up to that point. Sony had... Ratchet and Clank? Uncharted? Successful games for sure, but not the purgative Sony needed. For a while there every PS3 success story seemed supplemented by a healthy amount of duds.Lair, developed by Factor 5 (the same studio behind the excellent Star Wars Rogue Squadron games) was meant to prove the viability of Sixaxis motion controls... but it ended up being, in a sense, the PS3 analog to Wii's Red Steel. The less said the better. Haze, one of Sony's several supposed "Halo killers", earned the moniker H4.5e after a particularly unflattering review from IGN. Not even Korn could save them! Home, the PS3's answer to Second Life, was an amusing novelty but just that - a novelty. What's the point of a Second Life clone if you can't have cybersex anyway?
If anything, 2007 was the PlayStation 2's victory lap, with impressive showings like Persona 3, Odin Sphere, and God of War II. I think the seventh generation (PSWii60) of consoles was pretty disappointing in general, and the handhelds did the majority of the heavy lifting. Keep in mind this is coming from someone who was in 6-12th grade during the generation, which should provide prime rose-tinted classes. I do have some superficial nostalgia for the era, but ultimately I think many of the problems the industry faces today can be traced back to the HD gen: massively inflated budgets; onanistic "cinematic" experiences; bloated open worlds, just to name a few... Anyways, I just wanted to capture the zeitgeist of the early HD era beyond well-worn memes. While the PS3's initial comedy of errors isn't exactly esoteric forbidden knowledge, we still need oracles to pass tales down to future generations.
However the sorrows of young PS3 would not last forever. Their 2008 release schedule had Metal Gear Solid 4 and LittleBigPlanet; '09 had Uncharted 2 and Demon's Souls; '10 God of War 3 and Heavy Rain (for better and worse). Not even a massive PlayStation Network hack, and the ensuing 24-day outage in 2011 (which compromised 77 million users, permanently locking yours truly out of his first PSN account), could keep the PS3 down. Well, in a figurative sense.
By the time the Last of Us came out in 2013, the PS3 had picked itself up by the bootstraps and eventually outsold the 360 by ~two million units. It was a wild reversal of fortune on Sony's part, and that momentum followed into the eighth generation (Vita notwithstanding). I don't think any other console can claim such a feat, and for that I have to commend Sony. After all, who can resist the heartwarming tale of a scrappy, multibillion dollar underdog?
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