A giant boulder rolls toward the screen, and you’re running straight at the camera with no idea how much room you have left. That’s 1996. That’s Crash Bandicoot.
Sony’s PlayStation changed gaming forever by ditching cartridges for CD-ROMs and pushing flashy 3D graphics, at least by the standards of the time. It also handed the world a batch of series that refused to go away. Tomb Raider. Resident Evil. Both born on that console.
And a lot of those classics came out in 1996, which means they hit the big 3-0 in 2026. Some of them barely made a blip. Plenty of others built the PlayStation’s legacy and are still running decades later.
Crash was on every ad, and you can still hear the sound
Crash Bandicoot arrived in 1996 as the would-be mascot for PlayStation. Not quite Sonic, decidedly not Mario, and slapped across PS1 advertising all through the ’90s.
The PS1 alone got a run of sequels before Naughty Dog seemingly lost interest and moved on to Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us. Fine trade, but the ’90s were Crash’s heyday, and it started right here.
Remember hopping on a hog and tearing through the jungle? If you played a Crash game back then, odds are you can still hear the noise the Aku Aku tiki guys make. That sound-bite may be etched into my brain forever.
The first entry isn’t the best Crash Bandicoot game. It’s the one that made the rest possible, and the series is still adored.
Lara Croft got lost underground with the rest of us
Tomb Raider technically launched on the SEGA Saturn first, thanks to Europe, but nobody remembers it that way. It’s a PS1 classic, and it introduced a protagonist an entire generation of gamers was enamored with.
A female Indiana Jones and James Bond tied into one. Countless sequels, plus the movies starring Angelina Jolie in the 2000s, locked the series into popular culture.
Who else got hopelessly lost underground their first time through? Who else remembers the T-Rex just showing up?
Thirty years later the franchise is alive and well, with a couple of new Tomb Raider games on the way and a TV show in the works from Amazon.
Raccoon City turned into a household name
Capcom’s Resident Evil landed on PS1 in 1996 and quickly became the PlayStation’s highest-selling game at the time. It’s still one of the most influential and popular games ever made.
The franchise it spawned hasn’t slowed down either. Resident Evil 9 arrived in February of this year, and the series has stretched across TV shows, anime and a whole lot of movies, including a new one from Zach Cregger later in 2026.
Albert Wesker. Umbrella Corporation. Raccoon City. All of it traces back to this one entry.
The original doesn’t hold up as well as the best Resident Evil games do now. Play it anyway if you care about the series, or about horror generally. Thirty years down the line it’s still one of the greatest games ever released on a PlayStation.
