PS1 was released in North America in Sept. 1995, 30 years ago.
So the grandpa was born in 1967 to be 28 in 1995, which does make him 58 in 2025.
Still, it sounds more like the grandpa was buying the PS1 for his 8 year old son in 1995.
Grandpa definitely could have been a gamer who justified the purchase by saying it was for OPs father.
definitely true! I'm just not sure it's the most probable scenario, and regardless it's helpful to clarify the man bought a PS1 when he was nearly 30 years old.
My dad was/is a gamer. We had every Nintendo system except the SNES at release. He's a little bit older than the grandpa in this scenario, but he still gamed on the old systems by the time I stopped speaking to them. Had a huge CRT in the garage next to the beer fridge and all that lol. My sibling and I had our own games that we could play, but we always had to ask permission because the systems were my dad's
This is what it was like for me, too - my dad was a gamer and the gaming stuff was all his, not mine. My siblings and I all competed for time on the computer to be able to play (we didn't have consoles).
PS1 quite famously singlehandedly changed the target audience of consoles from little kids to college-age people. Largely due to ‘Wipeout’ with its acid visuals by Designers Republic and the edm soundtrack, and PS1's marketing, also with DR's involvement, including game rooms in over fifty nightclubs in the UK alone.
that's excellent context, thank you!
The first ‘Wipeout’ mostly had original instrumental edm music by Tim Wright, aka CoLD SToRAGE, with just three tracks by Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers, and Orbital. But the sequel ‘Wipeout 2097’, released a year later, had Future Sound of London's ‘We Have Explosive’, Fluke's ‘Atom Bomb’, an instrumental of The Profigy's ‘Firestarter’, and the like.
This was a promo poster for ‘Wipeout’ made by Designers Republic, featuring DJ Sara Cox:
In a gaming club near my home, the owner straight up put the ‘Wipeout 2097’ cd in the console and let it play the music like a stereo system. Which is something PS1 could do but N64 couldn't, because the latter still relied on cartridges.
Now imagine Nintendo 64 kids dealing with any of that for the first time.
By the way, ‘Wipeout’ was made by Psygnosis, who also played a large role in the development of the PS1 console — including iirc commissioning a dev kit based on a regular PC instead of a costly Sony workstation. Later on they functioned as a liaison for third-party developers, helping them with programming for the PlayStation. Sony thanked them by restructuring them into Sony Liverpool, and then closing them altogether in 2012.
My dad got us the NES when he was 35ish and played Tetris more than any of us.
The PS1 was still more like older console systems at the time. You didn’t have to be a “gamer” to buy one, titles like Spyro and Rayman especially were for ostensibly kids.
PS1 might have been the end it’s that though. Tekken 2 and Gran Tourismo started to signal an older college age shift in those consoles. That’s when I got mine anyway.
For sure, I meant gamer by the 90s standard, not today's. He was in the age group that would have made it super plausible that it was for him.
thank you for the reality check
Yeah, but that doesn't gut punch annon; which is primarily what I'm here for.
If you ever need a thought that confirms that the world is a sick and pathetic place, we are right on the precipice of a person being born whose grandparents were not alive for 9-11.
Fuck, I’m forty and I was alive for 9/11! Then I realized that I’m actually within the age range to be a grandmother, but just barely.
Our peers' kids are graduating high school and college. Maybe our kids too? But that also makes them technically old enough to have kids. That is a terrifying thought.
That's going to take a little while. If we assume that both parents got their first child at 18, that shouldn't happen before 2037. While it's technically possible to have children at 13, it's so far removed from the norm in developed countries that it makes me wonder if they even had access to a TV that would have let them perceive 9/11 if they had been alive and old enough back then.
I have encountered several people who gave birth to their first child at 13, and assuming that the generational issues that enable such horrific outcomes is not resolved, then it's entirely plausible that a child born in 2001 could have given birth to their first child in 2013-2014, who would then be giving birth to their first child later this year or early next year.
I bought a 3Dfx graphics accelerator so i could play Final Fantasy VII on the PC when it came out. It was more expensive than a PS1 would have been but i was a cool PC gamer, of course, not some console peasant. I'm a bit older than OP's grandpa in this story. And now get off my lawn, damn kids!
I had an ATI 3D Rage Pro. Fucking loved that thing. I used that all the way up to 2006. Man, MechWarrior 3 looked so good on that.
Still, it sounds more like the grandpa was buying the PS1 for his 8 year old son in 1995.
Sure, like how my parents bought "me" a computer when I was 4. Before windows 3.11 was a thing.
kids my age were playing console games by the time they were 6 - 8 years old easily - 8 years old is not like being 4 years old; still, I think parents often do buy things for their kids that are really for themselves and this could clearly be an example
Still, it sounds more like the grandpa was buying the PS1 for his 8 year old son in 1995.
Could very well be the other way around. My dad was born in 1967 and gamed on the PS1. I still have his Resident Evil strategy guides.
That the math checks out only make me angrier
2 successive generations at 20 years isn't statistically typical in north America in the last 60 years.
The math checks out, but isn't a median representation.
Kids got two more years not to ruin the run.
The only slightly suspicious thing here is that both grandpa and pop had kids at exactly age 20. Not only is that a little younger than average, it's also a very convenient number for a made up but easy to calculate scenario.
On one hand it's suspicous, on the other hand it's a convenient number if your parents and grandparents were around that age but you don't want to put in their actual ages because you have a habit of not giving out personal information.
That's when the word "about" is useful. My grandpa is "about 60" and my dad is "about 40", he got the PS1 when my dad was a kid. My dad had me when he was "about 20"...
I don't think people tend to make up specific ages that are not accurate when they're trying to obscure someone's exact age.
Counterpoint: "20" is shorter than "about 20" and this is a short comment by a 4chan anon.
Countercounterpoint: this is a short comment by a 4chan anon, so it's probably a lie.
Fakeness in 4chan no way?
Maybe but it’s not crazy. My father in-law had his first kid at 17. His second son also had a kid at 17. Crazier still is that second son's baby mama was 16 and she was born to a 16 year old.
I wish I was making this shit up.
first mistake was taking advice from 4chan
Several steps happened before taking the advice
Dude im 40. My grandma was playing tetris on the snes and prince of persia on the ps2. nothing weird about grandparents playing consoles. Also i'm a grandpa now.
Fifth gen has aged very badly compared to the third and fourth before it.
The graphics in non stylized art styles have aged (Lara Croft exhibit A) and I’d say controls have aged as well (tank controls in tomb raider and resident evil exhibits B and C)
But the gameplay was as good as it ever was. Crash Bandicoot, FFVII, Spyro, essential games of the generation. Despite my criticisms RE and Tomb Raider are as well. And these may be nostalgia talking but I think Chrono Cross, Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter belong on the list too.
I feel like complaining about early 3d era aging badly is like complaining about Its a Wonderful Life or Casablanca aging badly because they weren’t in color and they talk funny
And for an actual answer, it depends on the games you have and if you have the proper peripherals (memory cards, analog controller for the few games that require or greatly benefit).
Even getting it connected to a modern TV requires an adapter, and while you might be able to get a "good enough" one for cheap online, it's kind of a shitshow with unreliable cheap crap all over too.
Honestly if anyone is interested in PS1 amd doesn't already have the "setup" of a decent CRT and the hardware, they're probably better off emulating on their PC, maybe using a CRT shader.
If you want the "experience", you're better off getting a PS2 and soft-modding it. I wouldn't even know where to start with trying to find a modchip and the right burnable CDs and drive to burn with for the PS1. Modded PS2s are backwards compatible with all but like one very obscure PS1 game, and they can load from an internal hard drive, network, or USB depending on the hardware model.
Could also get a PS3, depending on how you feel about its settings for displaying on LCDs. That way, you have a console, but it has an HDMI port.
I don't get why people are so bothered by the passage of time. Y'all, you wouldn't believe the gaming hardware we have now if the ps1 isn't supposed to be far away (and it's even changed a very little bit since 2019).
The dawning realization of how little time we have on this earth hits really hard for some people, harder still for those that aren't making the best out of their time.
I just realized that most of the people commenting online are younger than me now and it made me more chill in reading all those comments now. (No, this is not me coping with the feeling of dread due to being reminded of my own mortality).
Time is an illusion, yo.
Adult people having fun is truly a hainous thought.
This would work just as well if their grandpa got it with 55.
The trick is that you are imagining their grandpa getting it at a young age.
*Bannon
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