The PS2 Fossil Record

I talk about the PS2 a lot here, it's probably where the broadest spectrum of my knowledge comes from. It's the system I tracked as many games for as I could, subscribed to multiple magazines, read websites. When I had trouble at home, I immersed myself in caring about video games to not think about what else about my life was going wrong. It is the peak of my often unhealthy obsession and hopefully will remain that way as I try to be an at least slightly more rounded person. I kind of want to take a chance to talk about the early period for the system, mostly before the late 2001 holiday period. This accounts for about... a year and a half of games? It's kind of boggling to think about given the reputation it enjoys now but the PS2 at this point was among the worst possible uses of your money from a pure video games to play specifically designed for it proposition. Like ignoring DVDs and PS1 compatibility.

I don't want to talk about this all at once, in my mind this will be an ongoing series where I sort of indulge in talking about the oddness of the early library for the system. So here I'll give sort of an overview. The PlayStation 2 launched in Japan on March 4, 2000. Players choices on launch were a variety of things that few people outside extremely specific niches would ever own by choice, from hardcore train urban planning simulation to whatever street mahjong is in contrast to non-street mahjong. Of the eleven games available on launch day, three of them would leave Japan. These games are Eternal Ring, Tekken Tag Tournament and Ridge Racer V. Namco really came in pretty much unopposed for mass appeal titles. In the following weeks another game that saw release in the west managed to appear, Konami's collection of Gradius 3 and 4. Alongside that, near as the internet can provide me, seems to have been another couple mahjong and billiard games and not much else. Over the following 7 months as the PS2 prepared to launch in the west the system would accrue a smattering of games to fill out a larger but no less anemic launch lineup. Then the real pain began. Every month there would be a smattering of frequently bizarre low quality titles released, sometimes deeply derivative, sometimes experimental, every month or so one of them would be relatively impressive, but until the end of 2001 there just wasn't a lot of lasting interest or relevance. Most everything released on the platform in that era just kind of faded into obscurity due to sheer disinterest.

The PS2 suffered an almost archetypal software drought, much as the PS3 did and much as the PS5 is at the moment. It just had the luxury of suffering it back when it was impossible to buy one for a year (again, sort of like the PS5). Because so few people could actively purchase PS2 software of this era there hasn't been much retrospective on it and I want to make this an occasional series to change that. I'll likely hit some of the few well remembered titles from this era like Onimusha and Dark Cloud at some point, but I also want to focus on what got left completely to the dustbin of history like Ephemeral Fantasia (which I'll admit inspired this) or Unison:: Rebels of Rhythm and Dance. It's a weird pile of misfit toys. I have no particular intent to approach these chronologically, though I will try to contextualize where they fit in the timeline. There might even be a few of these that are worth going back to, but as someone who suffered a number of them at the time I kinda have my doubts many of them will hold up. That said, sometimes the history is what matters and I want to actually document these a bit. The PS2 represented when many developers first laid hands on the hardware necessary to make relatively expansive 3D worlds, when multiple analog sticks became the standard, and boy howdy it took a while for either of those things to become the subjects of meaningful use. These games represent many developers applying a very PS1 era mindset to very different hardware and thus represent a fascinating snapshot of these two paradigms colliding.

I also kind of want to use this as an examination of why a system's first year honestly doesn't mean too much as long as people buy it somewhat consistently out of the gate. By examining this software and sort of ultimately concluding this series by looking at the end of 2001 it'll be a good excuse to figure out what kind of critical mass actually pushed the system to lasting success. There's plenty of PS2 software in this first year but there's a reason you don't remember much of it and I think really digging into its history will help explain why. I don't want this to be shooting fish in a barrel though. I'll try to approach all of these from the perspective of what they were attempting, what they may have failed to reach given how many of them are hastily converted PS1 games or have other strange histories that cut their development short. I may also extend this into some games that still carry this energy into the early part of 2002. Put simply I hope that over the course of writing these I gain a bit of a better understanding of what the attitude was at the time. Put myself into a time when Fantavision could be exciting, mourn the sad development cycle of Soul Reaver 2, contemplate the falling stars of the prior generation looking at Crash Bandicoot: the Wrath of Cortex, see the deaths of the Square Electronic Arts relationship begin to accelerate. This was a generation that made and destroyed many companies and this period set much of it in motion.

Is all that too grandiose an ambition? Eh, probably, but it's okay for my reach to exceed my grasp. I just want to examine the fossils left behind by this curious time in the industry and gain a better idea than I had at the time for what made it tick. I hope maybe it'll be interesting to anyone who chances to read it. I've often argued that the tendency to look only at a console's best or worst games really doesn't tell the story of what it was like to own a console, that everyone experienced a much larger selection of the merely pretty bad and pretty good and to really grasp what a system was you need to examine those, maybe now I can put my money where my mouth is.