Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of the PlayStation in North America, a milestone which sees over 377 million PlayStation consoles of various types sold worldwide.

One of the first commercially available CD-based games systems, the original PlayStation was launched in Japan on December 3, 1994 - becoming the first console to ship over 100 million units worldwide after nine years and six months on the market. The origins of the system lie in a dispute between Sony and Nintendo, with Sony originally developing a disc-based prototype addition to Nintendo's SNES system.

When Nintendo decided to contract Phillips to produce the drives instead, Ken Kutaragi was promoted to the head of PlayStation development in order to produce a market rival for Nintendo's machine. Internal opposition to the project was so strong that it was shifted in its entirety to Sony Music so that development could continue unhindered.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 3:20 pm and is filed under ByDesign Games, Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.