I Had Quit Games. It Still Made Me Hesitate.

I Had Quit Games. It Still Made Me Hesitate.

In the spring of 2000 I was thinking about replacing my VHS deck. A DVD player was not a small purchase then. Sony put the PlayStation 2 on the shelf for 39,800 yen — a DVD player, with a game console attached to it. I stood there working out the difference in price. It was almost nothing.

What I see in that design now is ambition. Every console before it announced itself as a toy the moment you carried it into the room. This one was built to be allowed into the living room, set beside the television and the amplifier, and then left there. The disc slot is hidden; the front closes and the machine goes quiet. Teiyu Goto, who designed it, was aiming at exactly that — audio-visual equipment, and a machine that refuses to fade into the background. In 2000 it looked like the future had been delivered early. The plastic does not feel like much in the hand, and it takes up more room in a room than its measurements account for, but I no longer read that as carelessness. It intended to be seen standing there.

Here is the part I did not know until recently. On the early units the DVD player was not inside the machine. You installed it from the bundled utility disc onto a memory card — 634 kilobytes — and slid that card in to watch a film. The function that sold the console rode on a removable card. Buy one of those early units today without its card and it will not play a movie. Nothing is broken. The film is simply not in the machine.

I did not buy one. I had stopped playing games by then. And that is what stays with me about the PlayStation 2 — not the sales figures, but that its ambition reached the living room of a man who was not going to play it, and made him stand there and weigh it. I still take that seriously when a console passes through my hands.