PlayStation 2 at 20: the console that revealed the future of gaming

The successor to Sony's original PlayStation is still the bestselling games machine of all time - and it has a legacy of true innovation

It has to be said, the launch titles were not great. When the PlayStation 2 arrived in Japan on 4 March 2000, the first games early purchasers got to take home with them included a mahjong sim and a digital train set. The big-name titles, Street Fighter EX3 and Ridge Racer 5, were formulaic entries in tired legacy franchises. Meanwhile, Sega's Dreamcast machine, released a year earlier, was hosting innovative hits such as Shenmue, Crazy Taxi and Power Stone. Had Sony stumbled after its hugely successful and highly disruptive original PlayStation?

No, it had not. It just took developers time to understand the architecture of this forward-looking console - especially its hyperbolically named Emotion Engine, the 128-bit central processing unit at the core of the box, designed to generate large, explorable 3D environments and fill them with life.