Sony Computer Entertainment America announced on Friday that, in the seven years since the US launch on October 26 2000, PS2 has shifted 120 million units and over a billion pieces of software. The company is expecting to ship a further 12 million machines worldwide by the end of March and reckons it has 160 titles on the way, adding to the 1,400 already available.
I've been looking at a few 'best PS2 games ever'-type lists (IGN, Gamespy, About.com, etc) and as you'd expect (although current PS3 detractors might need reminding) very few titles come from the first year. The launch line-up wasn't great with only Tekken Tag Tournament regularly popping up amid nostalgic recollections. Interestingly, things hot up pretty quickly with 2001 providing the likes of GTA III, Final Fantasy X and Ico. Next year PS3 has Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5 and Final Fantasy XIII...
You may recall that PS2 was initially criticised as a tough platform to develop for (here's Keiji Inafune politely making this point). Tech heads also loved to point out the machine's anti-aliasing problems, which led to ugly 'jaggies'. These days everyone's similarly complaining of PS3's fill rate 'issues' and/or its controversial use of a non-unified shader architecture.
The difference with PS2, of course, was that it didn't have effective competition. If Sega had thought of giving Dreamcast a motion controller, things might have been different - although in the company's defence it did think of including a built in modem and of developing a capable online gaming infrastructure (which was later bought by Nokia to form the basis of N-Gage Arena).
Wii is still far from developing an insurmountable lead. Xbox 360 probably never will. There are a hell of a lot of PlayStation veterans still to commit in this generation.
Perhaps Hegel was right - perhaps we're incapable of learning from history.
