It’s been a while since I dove into my pool of video game nostalgia. I’ve already talked about my fond memories of the SEGA Dreamcast, my troubling experience with the original Microsoft XBox and why I didn’t really play with my Nintendo Gamecube all that much. Well, it’s time to go back into my memories and talk about probably my favorite video game console of all time: the original Sony PlayStation.

Yes, I’m talking about the original gray box that surprised Nintendo, dominated SEGA and probably gave Microsoft the idea to enter the console gaming market. This was Sony official first foray into the video game console making business and, against the stranglehold Nintendo and SEGA had in this domain, managed to take over the gaming world. And I was there since Day 1… sorta.

You see, while I always loved playing video games, it wasn’t a really good hobby to get into in the Philippines, which is where I grew up and live. As the name of this blog strongly hints at, the Philippines is a third world country, meaning the more luxurious things can come off as rather pricey. This was especially true for electronics and, you guessed it, video gaming. This was most especially true for me since I was a teenager with a measly allowance, which was enough to get me lunch at school and maybe a few games at the local arcade. But that was it. Saving enough cash to buy something as extravagant as, say, Nintendo’s Super NES/Famicom or SEGA’s Genesis/MEGA Drive, was going to take a while. Not only that, buying the games from my tiny savings would take me more than just a while. So, I never really bothered.

That all changed with the original Sony PlayStation. That’s because, as the Philippines is a third world country, it was also known for another thing: piracy. Almost as soon as the Sony PlayStation came out, hackers found ways to get around the system’s copyright protection, making it possible to simply copy games onto a blank CD. This fact made it much easier to get my parents to buy me a Sony PlayStation as getting games for it would be almost dirt cheap! If I remember correctly, a bootleg CD would be around 100 Philippine pesos. That came to around $4 to $6 US! That was more than a steal!

So, you can bet I got so many games for the original PlayStation! Triple-A game? Bought it. Some weird unknown game I haven’t heard of? Bought it. A game that’s in Japanese without any English translation? You bet I bought it! It was so easy to buy pirated games for the system so I played so many games for it. Honestly, sometimes it’s a blur as I can’t really remember most of them. I guess that’s the problem when you’re that spoiled for choice: you don’t choose and you just get them all!

However, it was in this way that I managed to find some really cool gems not a lot of gamers were talking about at the time. The system had some really underrated games such as Brave Fencer Musashi, Alundra, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure and, of course, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and its sequel, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. Geez, how I love these old Lunar RPGs! And I don’t think I would’ve found them if my Sony PlayStation couldn’t play pirated games!

The mere fact the original Sony PlayStation used the CD format had the additional benefit of it being my very first music CD player. Sure it was crude and, honestly, kind of a bother to have to turn on your TV just to play some music. But it was better than nothing, I guess.

Still, there was the weird extra benefit from a lot of the early original PlayStation games as, when you got one of the CDs, you also got a hidden soundtrack! I discovered this by pure accident with my copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as I turned on the console’s music CD function before playing the game.

It turns out a lot of the music in the games were never encoded as game data and just placed into the CD as music tracks. All you had to do to access them was to skip the first track, which is the game data, and you can access the songs directly. So, if you have an old PlayStation version of say, Dance Dance Revolution or, my personal favorite, King of Fighters ’96 on hand, you can plug that sucker into any music CD player and jam to the tunes without playing the game!

Additionally, as this is the Philippines, we didn’t just pirate video games, we pirated movies as well! This was also around the time when the VCD format was big in the country for the same reasons why the PlayStation was a huge hit here: it was so easy to pirate movies. And do you know what my first VCD player was? It was also the original PlayStation!

You may ask how did I get my gray Sony console to play VCDs when it didn’t have that capability? Well, you know that little port found in the back of that console behind a panel? Well, that the very underused serial I/O port of the original Sony PlayStation. Most people probably are familiar with it as that’s where you could stick a cheat code device like the Action Replay to the console. You could also hook other devices, such as the unofficial Sony PlayStation VCD Player Add-On card! Just plug in that sucker and you have yourself a Sony PlayStation that can play movies!

Now, as this wasn’t an official Sony product, I did have some problems with it. The biggest one would be how it didn’t connect securely into the I/O Serial Port! I literally had to duct tape the sucker to the back of my system to get it to stick! Still, it was great to have this neat all-in-one piece of hardware that could not only play games, but it could play music and movies as well! I can’t help but think Sony noticed all of the ways people were modding their console and decided to add these functions in natively when they designed the PlayStation 2.

Of course, all of this did cause a lot of wear and tear to my original gray PlayStation. This was especially true for the CD lens reader. Alas, all of this game playing, music playing and VCD watched strained my poor PlayStation CD and things started skipping like crazy. It did get to the point where I couldn’t even play a game anymore! I actually got a few more months of use from performing the odd trick of flipping your Sony PlayStation upside down. And yes, this does work for a time but not because of the more common thought that the lens is much closer to the disc. It’s actually because the track where the CD lens is placed can move more freely thanks to gravity pulling it off the track just so slightly.

Eventually, however, even that didn’t work… but I still got a couple of more years of use from my old and gray PlayStation by simply going to a repair shop and getting a new CD assembly put it! And, unlike with my replacement original XBox DVD drive, this replacement worked for years! In fact, I didn’t stop playing on my original PlayStation because it broke down. No, I simply stopped playing games on it because there were no more games to play for it!

By this time, the PlayStation 2 had come out and I’ve reformed from playing pirated games and opted to actually support the developers by buying original games. So, for the longest time, my old and gray PlayStation was put into storage. I never bothered to upgrade to the smaller and more compact PS One model because my original bulky boy was still working fine! Years did pass and I eventually gave my original PlayStation system, along with what I assume was a pallet of bootleg games, to my less fortunate cousins. They never experienced console gaming so I do think it was a good idea to give them some happiness.

There are times, however, when I do regret giving my original Sony PlayStation system to them. I had that console for a good decade and it was still functioning for that same decade. I’m not so sure if my cousins realized how much the system means to me and how fantastic of a console it is. Ah, but that’s in the past. Twenty years have come and gone since I gave it up. Thankfully, I still have all those fond memories of playing that old gray box. And if that old console gave my cousins even a fraction of the joy it gave me, then I do say it was worth it.

What are some of your memories of the original PlayStation console? Let me know in the comments section below!