By rights, the PS1 should have flopped. Sony had never shipped a console, it was gambling on CD-ROMs while Nintendo held the line on cartridges, and the market showed no obvious gap for a newcomer.
Then came Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot and Metal Gear. An already-established series, Final Fantasy, was handed FF7 and turned into a giant. That is how an unproven machine ended up among the best-loved consoles anyone has built.
Anyone who lived through the ’90s with one in the house has a specific memory attached to it. The opening of FF7. That boulder chasing Crash. Being hopelessly lost in a cave as Lara Croft, or shaking off police cars in Driver or Need For Speed.
It was a deep library. Still, three titles turned up in nearly every collection.
Crash was the mascot, and the sequel was the peak
Through the ’90s, Crash Bandicoot was the face of PlayStation. Remember the Pizza Hut ads. Or the one where Crash stood outside Nintendo’s offices heckling them. For a stretch of years, the words “PlayStation” and “Crash” may as well have meant the same thing.
Sales for the original were strong. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back did even better, and to this day it ranks among the best-selling PS1 releases of all time.
The remakes arrived later, as did an unexpected fourth entry decades on. Yet the second game is still the one most people name as the series’ high point, because it sharpened everything the first had established, then piled on meaner bosses and weirder characters.
Was Crash Bandicoot 2 on my shelf? Obviously. It was on the shelf of just about every kid who owned a PlayStation.
An RPG became the second best-selling game on the console
The second best-selling PS1 game ever is Final Fantasy 7 — an odd fact to sit with, given that RPGs were still very much a niche pursuit back in the ’90s.
You could not escape the hype. Yes, those graphics are comical by today’s standards, but back then they were pulling off things no console had shown before. The look is what pulled people in. What held them for the next 40 hours was the cast and the depth of the story.
There was precisely one reason I bought a PlayStation, and it was Final Fantasy 7. Something tells me plenty of others did the same.
For the RPG genre it was a turning point, and for Sony a major victory. Even in houses where the T rating got you a flat no from your parents, you played it round a friend’s place or sat watching an older sibling grind through Shinra and Sephiroth. FF7 comes up in any conversation about the PS1, and the reverse holds just as firmly.
The racing sim nobody in my house wanted
This one sits strangely depending on your tastes: the best-selling PS1 game of all time remains Gran Turismo.
In my circle it was all Twisted Metal and Need For Speed. Everyone else on earth was buying Gran Turismo like hotcakes. Its sequel shifted serious numbers on PS1 as well, and that is how the franchise cemented itself in racing for good.
A few others deserve a nod in passing: Tomb Raider, Tekken 3, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Spyro the Dragon.
Why it still gets sequels
Hardly any racing game pulls off that degree of realism without losing the fun of actually playing it. That balancing act is precisely why Gran Turismo’s legacy endures and why new entries keep arriving.
Sure, the later games refined it. But the formula was cracked in the first one.
Own a PlayStation 1 in the ’90s and you owned this game — or you borrowed it off a mate and quietly never handed it back.