PLAYSTATION AT 25: A VISUAL HISTORY

AAfew months ago, we celebrated 30 years of one of my personal favorite gadgets ever, Nintendo’s Game Boy. This week was all about another favorite of mine: the PlayStation, which just turned 25. Although I actually never owned the original version of the console (shout out to my loving parents) I still remember childhood sleepovers spent sitting on the floor way too close to the TV, and the broken controllers and broken friendships that this thing caused.

For this issue, I wanted to take the same simple, but effective approach as we did for the Game Boy. That meant picking a nice color to compliment each console, and that can also fit nicely on our landing page where you can read the rest of the stories from this week’s issue. Oh, and also browsing eBay in order to find everything we needed for this. That involved finding multiple consoles, controllers, handhelds, and accessories, all spanning more than two decades of gaming history. Some of them were pretty dirty. And some never arrived on time. (Unfortunately, this means this photo history is slightly incomplete. I’m looking at you, PSP.)

But that didn’t feel like it was enough.

The next step was to create some additional element to the photos to make them pop just a bit more. And that’s where the patterned background comes into play. Now, I don’t want to spend too much time explaining what that background is — other than to say it plays an important role in PlayStation history. I’d love to see if any of our readers can identify what the pattern is actually made out of. Leave your guesses in the comments.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge