PlayStation 2 — The Game Console That Played DVDs

The PlayStation 2 went on sale in North America on 26 October 2000 at $299 (C$449 in Canada). Japan had it first: the PS2 launched there on 4 March 2000 at a standard price of ¥39,800, 236 days before the North American release. Europe followed on 24 November 2000. The Japanese date and price had been announced the previous year, on 13 September 1999.

Against its rivals, Sega's Dreamcast had already reached Japan in November 1998, and Microsoft's Xbox would arrive in North America in November 2001. The PS2 landed between them—Japan first, then North America and Europe in time for the holidays.

The announcement of 13 September 1999

According to PC Watch's report of 13 September 1999, Sony Computer Entertainment announced that day that the PS2 would go on sale on 4 March 2000 at ¥39,800, and published its specifications.

SIE's official history says the Emotion Engine took its name from its ability to generate images that looked realistic for the time, and that it was made up of eight separate units, each with its own job.

The PS2 as a DVD player

What set the PS2 apart from the previous generation was that it used DVD-ROM for its games and could play ordinary DVD movies as well. The DVD format had started in Japan in 1996, but in 2000 a dedicated player was still not cheap.

Looking back on the console's 20th anniversary, Famitsu described the PS2 as having been taken up as an inexpensive DVD player that could also play games, and credited it with a large part in spreading DVD itself. SIE's own history says that by 2000 DVD had become the most desirable way to watch films at home, and lists cutting-edge games, DVD playback, online functions and backward compatibility as the package that made the launch hard to resist.

Compatibility mattered too. A new generation usually meant that a player's old games would not run on the new box; the PS2 avoided that. Sony's North American launch release claimed compatibility with more than 800 original PlayStation titles.

North America: 500,000 units to start

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced in a press release dated 26 October 2000 that the PS2 was on sale across North America. The headline called it the biggest consumer-electronics product launch in history—SCEA's own description. The release gave these figures:

• 500,000 units shipped to retailers for launch, with about 100,000 more a week on average through the holiday season
• 26 titles available on launch day, and more than 50 by the end of 2000
• The $299 box included a DUALSHOCK 2 controller and the necessary cables
• A bay for a hard drive, for broadband connectivity to come

In Japan, Famitsu counts ten titles released alongside the console. The 26 available in North America reflected seven months of software that had accumulated since.

Going online, and getting thinner

According to SIE's official history, online play came to the PS2 in 2001 with the separately sold Network Adaptor; at launch, networking was left to an add-on.

On 21 September 2004 Sony announced a slim model, the SCPH-70000. Its press release set the dates as 1 November 2004 in North America and Europe and 3 November in Japan. Internal volume was cut by 75%, weight was halved, and thickness fell from 7.8 cm to 2.8 cm. An Ethernet port was built in, and the North American model also had a modem port, since Sony said about 40% of its online PS2 users there connected through an analogue modem.

Shipments over time

In the January 2004 release SCEI said shipments had grown at 1.6 times the rate of the original PlayStation, reaching 70 million in three years and ten months. All of these are Sony's own figures.

The end: 28 December 2012

According to Game*Spark, Sony stopped shipping the PS2 in Japan on 28 December 2012. That was almost 12 years and 10 months after launch, and more than six years after its successor, the PlayStation 3, arrived. The worldwide total cited at the time was more than 150 million; the figure SIE now publishes in its business data is more than 160 million.

For comparison, Nintendo IR gives lifetime sales of the Nintendo DS as 154.02 million units. Both are figures each company published about its own hardware, and SIE's number for the PS2 is the higher of the two.

For the first machine, see the original PlayStation; for the wider story, the game consoles timeline.