Category Archives: Celebration

Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Celebration, Commodore 64, Origin Systems, PC

Ultima Special

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Richard Garriott‘s famous Role-Playing Game series began officially in 1981 with “Ultima” for the Apple II. It was a pioneering mixture of single-player adventuring, combat and levelling, with humble beginnings, starting out on early 8-bit systems and working its way up to modern PCs in the 1990s. The Ultima series was always evolving; always innovating, and constantly proving to be a considerable influence on story-based, single-player RPGs, and the fantasy adventure game market in general.

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Celebration, Rebellion

2000AD Special

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2000AD is a famous, British science fiction comic that was first launched in 1977 (26th February 1977 to be precise), and I distinctly remember getting and reading the first issue and being hooked from that moment on. 2000AD pulled no punches, with its hard-hitting fantasy storylines and stand-out characters, and it made a big impression on anyone who read it.

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Celebration, First Star

Boulder Dash Special

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Boulder Dash is a very special game. It is a simple idea, with cute graphics and devious gameplay that combine to make an addictive combination of arcade-style action, survival and puzzle-solving.

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Amstrad CPC, Celebration

Amstrad CPC Special

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The Amstrad Colour Personal Computer (CPC) is a family of 8-bit home computers that were designed and manufactured by British company Amstrad (the infamous one led by Alan Sugar), and marketed as competition to the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum from 1984 onward.

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Acorn, Archimedes, Celebration

Acorn Archimedes Special

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The Acorn Archimedes is a family of home computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems are based on Acorn‘s ARM RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture with a 32-bit CPU (using 26-bit addressing) and were manufactured from 1987 until the mid-1990s.

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Celebration, PlayStation, Sony

Sony PlayStation Special

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The Sony PlayStation was the first machine in the PlayStation series of video game consoles and it came out in Japan first, in 1994, and in 1995 everywhere else. It is widely seen as being the console that changed gaming forever; the console that marked the transition from cartridge-based console gaming to CD-ROM based games, and also the console that ushered in a new era of 3D gaming. It was also the console that made Sony a major player in the video game business.

Over its eleven-year lifespan 7,918 individual games were released for the PlayStation, accumulating just under a billion sales overall. The console itself became the first to sell over 100 million units.

This week I’m going to be featuring screenshots from a number of my favourite PlayStation games. Some you might have heard of (or even played), others you might never have seen before. One thing is for sure, though: interest in the original PlayStation is still going strong, some 27 years after its initial release. And that’s because these great games endure, and because emulation has breathed new life into the format.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the blue PlayStation is: that is a development PlayStation – used by developers to create and test the games themselves. The photos are of my very own console, taken by myself, specifically for this blog.

Here’s a full list of what was published:

Rapid Reload
Kula World
No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!
Ganbare Goemon: Uchuu Kaizoku Akogingu
Devil Dice
Revelations: Persona
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
Pepsiman
Metal Gear Solid
Ridge Racer
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
Strider 2
Jumping Flash!
Vib-Ribbon

Enjoy,
The King of Grabs

More: Sony PlayStation on Wikipedia