How A Demo Disc Defined The Original PlayStation
, 2022-10-17 08:08:00,
If you were a PlayStation early adopter, chances are your console came bundled with a copy of Demo One. This unassuming CD-ROM didn’t look like much from the outside—especially the PAL version. It was blank, black, and covered in copyright text. But then you slipped that thing into your freshly unboxed PS1, clunked the plastic lid shut, and as the disc whirred softly in the tray the future was beamed from your crappy little portable CRT directly into your brain. I’m exaggerating, of course. It was just a bunch of demos. But for someone who had previously only experienced video games through the pixels of a SNES, Demo One was a thrilling window into a brave new world of 3D visuals and CD audio.
There were a lot of regional variations of Demo One. Depending on where in the world you bought your PlayStation, your copy would have been slightly different from everyone else’s. It was the UK version that introduced me to the wonder of Sony’s world-conquering console, and I played it so many times that every second of it is permanently burned into my mind. After the classic PlayStation startup sequence, there was a black screen with white text saying, simply, d1. Then, suddenly, a surge of synthesizers. Shimmering lines rotating and intersecting. Then an extremely ’90s dance beat kicked in as the intro sequence began. Demo One was released in 1995, and there’s no mistaking the era it’s from.
Between rapid-fire clips of Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden, Ridge Racer, WipEout, and Destruction Derby, text flew towards the screen demonstrating the power of the hardware buzzing away beneath your PS1’s grey plastic shell. 500,000 texture-mapped light-sourced polygons a second. 1.5 million flat-shaded polygons a second. 16.7 million colours. 256×224 to 640×480 resolution. 16mb of main RAM. 8mb of VRAM. I had no idea what half of this meant at the time, but it sounded impressive. The combination of this bombardment of baffling data, the pounding music, and the mind-blowing (at the time) real-time gameplay footage was incredibly impactful. A perfect introduction to the console.
Then it was into the menus, with their corny industrial sci-fi aesthetic and Eurobeat soundtrack. Under GAMES you’d find a selection of demos including Crash Bandicoot, WipEout, Descent, Die Hard Trilogy, Formula 1, Tekken 2, and Actua Golf—although the selection of games on…
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