The most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world.
|
 |
 
|
The PS1 was cool in the 90s because CDs were cool. That was honestly enough.
| cowgod | 07/10/26 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: July 10th, 2026 9:56 PM Author: cowgod “A laser reads it.” That sentence did more work than most launch libraries. People now talk about “gameplay” as though children in 1997 were comparative-media scholars weighing input latency and level design. They were not. They were consumers standing at the edge of a new machine age. The disc was silver. It caught the light. It disappeared into a gray box. Then music, speech and whole worlds came out. That was the product. Gaming has always been technology mass-marketed to civilians through play. The game is the demonstration. Pong proved the television could answer back. The NES proved a toy could contain a world. The Genesis sold speed. The PS1 sold the future itself. Cartridges looked like toys. CDs looked like information. They belonged to stereos, computers, movies, record stores and the polished adult world. They held forbidden albums and Windows software. They came in jewel cases with tiny books and rainbow undersides. You handled them by the edges because the object seemed scientific. A fingerprint could wound the future. Then Sony put games on them. Now your machine had loading screens because it was thinking. It had full-motion video because it knew cinema. It had red-book audio because the soundtrack was physically on the disc like a real album. Sometimes you could put the game in a CD player and hear it. This felt less like compatibility than espionage. “A laser reads it” was cooler than any gameplay. It did not matter that the laser was slow. Slowness made the ritual visible. The lid closed. The disc spun. The machine searched. A logo emerged from darkness with a sound like a that THX sound intro.
And the discs were Shiny af. People like Shiny things imho.
|