Over 155 million units sold in the world, and nearly 4000 games developed for the platform. These figures are probably the best way to understand the unrivaled success of the Playstation 2. The best selling videogame console of all time turns twenty today. It went on sale on March 4th, 2000, in Japan, then it came to a number of international market in the following months. 

Its success is tied to a number of factors and, among them, its bold and new design certainly played a role. The Playstation 2, with its futuristic look that resembled a tall dark skyscraper with no windows, out of blade-runneresque future, was the first mass-marketed console that was supposed stand upright, thanks to a couple of unapologetically purple wings at its base. 

This design was strikingly similar to the Microbox case Atari used on one of its unreleased Falcon consoles, which Sony’s engineers even reference in the Playstation 2 design patents. Unlike that product from 1992, which was probably out of its time, Sony’s device was the incarnation of the new millennium, proving that the timing of a design is important as well in creating a product’s success story.

The reasons for the Playstation 2’s success were also merely technological: it was the first Sony console to be able to connect to the Internet, giving us a glimpse of what the future of gaming would look like, while internal memory could be expanded with an hard drive (a feature axed on the subsequent slim design from 2004). Last but not least, Playstation 2 could play DVDs as well, making it a complete multimedia box that would extend beyond gaming. That was also a reason for its commercial success, because in a time where DVD players were still expensive, you could justify the purchase of an expensive “kid’s videogame console” by merging into it the need for a movie player that the whole family could enjoy.