Good night PS2 - god bless her
A few weeks ago Ken Kutaragi, the so-called "Father of PlayStation" announced he was retiring as the head of Sony’s games division.
Widely seen as a classic case of jumping before you were pushed, after the troubled launch of the PlayStation 3, his ignoble exit marks a very neat end to the career of the most successful video games console ever made.
Our gallery of the top ten PS2 games
In what is a useful reminder for new PS3 owners, dismayed at Sony’s so far wretched run of bad PR, the PS2 actually started off very poorly with dodgy memory cards, broken disc drives and almost a whole year without any decent games (not to mention an eight month delay from the Japanese launch to the European one).
R.I.P PS2
The late release of the Xbox and GameCube though gave Sony free reign to butter up third party developers and to sell the PS2 not just as a new console but as one of the cheapest ways to own a, then new, DVD player.
Although it was near 100% backwards compatible with PS one games the PS2 didn’t have any online functionality out of the box and Sony only half heartedly bothered with a modem two years later.
It clearly didn’t affect the PS2’s success though, as it became the console of choice for the masses with a (relatively) low price, an uncomplicated range of features and by far the greatest variety of games. In short the opposite of the PS3.
