The PS1 was supposed to lose. Sony was a newcomer with no console track record, betting on CD-ROMs while Nintendo stuck with cartridges, walking into a market that had no obvious room for it.
Then it gave us Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot and Metal Gear. It took an established series like Final Fantasy and, with FF7, made it enormous. That’s how an untested box became one of the most beloved consoles ever made.
If you were alive in the ’90s and had one, you remember something specific. FF7’s opening sequence. Running from that boulder as Crash. Getting lost underground as Lara Croft, or outrunning cops in Driver or Need For Speed.
The library was deep. But three games showed up in almost everybody’s collection.
Crash was the mascot, and the sequel was the peak
Crash Bandicoot was PlayStation’s face in the ’90s. The Pizza Hut commercials. The one where Crash heckled Nintendo outside its offices. For a few years there, saying “PlayStation” and saying “Crash” amounted to the same thing.
The first game sold well. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back sold better, and it’s still one of the top-selling PS1 games ever released.
Remakes came. So did a surprise fourth entry decades later. The second one is still widely considered the best Crash game, because it took what the original built and tightened it, then handed you nastier boss fights and stranger characters on top.
Did I own Crash Bandicoot 2? Of course I did. So did roughly every kid with a PlayStation.
An RPG became the second best-selling game on the console
Final Fantasy 7 is the second best-selling PS1 game of all time, which is a strange sentence when you remember that RPGs were still a niche concern in the ’90s.
The hype was everywhere. Those graphics look laughable now, sure, but at the time they were doing things nobody had seen on a console. The visuals got people in the door. The deep narrative and the cast kept the controller in their hands for the next 40 hours.
I bought a PlayStation for exactly one reason, and that reason was Final Fantasy 7. I doubt I’m alone.
It was a watershed moment for the RPG genre and a serious win for Sony. And even if the T rating meant your parents said no, you played it at a friend’s house or watched an older sibling grind away at Shinra and Sephiroth. You can’t think about the PS1 without FF7 showing up, and it doesn’t work in the other direction either.
The racing sim nobody in my house wanted
Depending on your taste, this one lands oddly: Gran Turismo is still the best-selling PS1 game of all time.
My friends were Twisted Metal and Need For Speed people. The rest of the planet bought Gran Turismo like hotcakes. The sequel moved big numbers on PS1 too, which is how the series became a permanent fixture in racing.
Worth mentioning on the way past: Tomb Raider, Tekken 3, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Spyro the Dragon.
Why it still gets sequels
Very few racing games manage this much realism while staying fun to actually play. That balance is the whole reason Gran Turismo’s legacy is still going and still producing new entries.
Later games improved on it. Fine. The first one is where the formula got figured out.
If you had a PlayStation 1 in the ’90s, you owned this game, or you borrowed it from a friend and quietly never gave it back.
