Japanese electronics giant Sony is set to celebrate 30 years since it launched the PlayStation console, the little grey box that catapulted the firm into the gaming big league.
PlayStation was Sony's first foray into the world of video games and when it hit the shelves in Japan on December 3, 1994, the company needed to sell one million units to cover its costs.
In the end, the gadget became a legend, selling more than 102 million units, helping to launch many of the industry's best-loved franchises and positioning Sony as a heavyweight in a hugely lucrative sector.
"PlayStation changed the history of video games," said Hiroyuki Maeda, a Japanese specialist in video game history.
"It truly transformed everything: hardware, software, distribution and marketing."
One of the keys to its success was broadening the appeal of a pastime that had often been dismissed as a hobby for children.
From the off, the firm was clear that it wanted to trash this image.
In part this stems from Sony's rivalry with Nintendo, which was already a dominant player in the sector by the mid-1990s, but whose games skewed young.
- Sony 'humiliated' -
The original PlayStation can trace its history to a falling out between the two great Japanese firms.
They had partnered in the late 1980s to develop a version of the Super Nintendo console with an in-built CD player.
But Nintendo suspected Sony were using the project as a way to muscle into the gaming sector and abruptly cancelled the partnership in 1991.
"Sony found itself in a humiliating position," said Maeda, so pushed ahead with the project by itself.
The hardware proved to be revolutionary, CD-ROMs being cheaper and storing much more data than the cartridges used by Nintendo and other consoles.
And to further distinguish itself from Nintendo, Sony courted a young adult audience with fighting games like "Tekken", out-and-out horror with "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill", and military titles like "Metal Gear Solid".
Its advertising also followed a more grown-up path.
Hollywood auteur David Lynch was drafted in to direct ads for the PS2 launched in 2000 -- conjuring a nightmare vision of floating heads and talking ducks certainly not meant for younger audiences.
"The older audience obviously had better purchasing power than children," said Philippe Dubois, founder of M05, a French association that aims to preserve digital heritage.
The PS2 is still the most successful console in history, having sold more than 160 million units.
- 'New sensations' -
Over the past 30 years, the competition has intensified and the technology has been honed.
While Sega and other rivals have fallen by the wayside, Microsoft has entered the fray with its Xbox, and Nintendo is still on the scene with its Switch console.
But the industry is enduring tough times.
A surge in popularity and investment during the pandemic has subsided and Sony's PlayStation division recently laid off hundreds of workers.
Plenty of analysts are also predicting that cloud gaming will soon render consoles obsolete.
Sony appears undaunted though, recently launching an upgraded version of its PS5 with a marketing push that highlighted new AI features.
Bloomberg has reported that the Japanese firm is also planning a new hand-held version of the PlayStation, which would once again pit it against old rival Nintendo, undisputed king of portable devices.
However, for the purists, few innovations were as great as the original console's ability to handle 3D graphics.
The technology was instrumental for the appeal of classic games such as "Tomb Raider" and "Final Fantasy VII".
"We discovered sensations, emotions that we hadn't experienced with earlier consoles," said French YouTuber and PlayStation enthusiast Cyril 2.0.
He said he had collected almost every title released for the PlayStation in Europe -- some 1,400 -- and insisted the formula for success was not complicated.
"For consoles, games are still the most important thing," he said.
Father says 'everyone told us we would fail'
The PlayStation has been a colossal consumer hit, but three decades ago, its creator Ken Kutaragi struggled to convince both game-makers and his bosses at Sony that his console would be a winner.
"Everyone told us we would fail," Kutaragi told AFP in a rare interview.
With revolutionary 3D graphics and grown-up titles like "Tomb Raider" and "Metal Gear Solid", the device first hit shelves on December 3, 1994.
Before that, Nintendo's NES console and similar gaming machines were considered "children's toys", the 74-year-old Kutaragi said.
Popular games like "Super Mario Bros" were two-dimensional, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) was a rarity even in Hollywood.
"Most of the executives (at Sony) were fiercely opposed," fearing for the Japanese giant's reputation as a producer of high-end electronics, Kutaragi said.
Japanese game-makers gave a "frosty response" too, as creating 3D games in real time seemed "unthinkable" at the time.
Films with CGI took one or two years to make in those days, with budgets of tens of millions of dollars, he said.
But Kutaragi, then a Sony employee, was not deterred.
"We wanted to make the most of technological progress to create a new form of entertainment," the engineer said, his eyes gleaming.
His ambition paid off: the console -- now in its fifth generation -- became a household name. The PlayStation 2 was the world's top-selling games console with 160 million units sold.
- Nintendo drama -
Sony and fellow Japanese game giant Nintendo are industry rivals, but more than three decades ago they worked together to make a CD-ROM reader compatible with the Super Nintendo console, which could only take game cartridges.
With Nintendo's permission, Sony was also developing a machine capable of reading both CDs and cartridges, with the working title "Play Station" -- the first time the famous name was used.
But the pair's bonhomie ended dramatically.
Hours after Sony unveiled its new project at a 1991 Las Vegas trade show, Nintendo, spooked by Sony's rights over the games, announced it would team up with Dutch firm Philips instead.
The episode was seen as a betrayal and humiliation for Sony, and all of these burgeoning projects failed to materialise.
"Newspapers said it was bad for us," Kutaragi said. But "it was inevitable that we and Nintendo would follow our own paths, because our approaches were totally different".
For Nintendo, "video games were toys that had nothing to do with technology," he said.
And without the snub, the PlayStation as we know it "would never have seen the light of day".
- AI predictions -
When Sony launched its PlayStation and CD games in Japan in 1994, and in Western countries some months later, Nintendo had a stranglehold on console sales.
So Sony used its experience in the music industry to develop a new distribution model, selling the gadgets at electronics stores instead of toy stores and creating new supply chains adapted to local markets.
Kutaragi eventually became vice president of Sony but left the conglomerate in 2007 after the launch of the PlayStation 3, which initially struggled commercially.
Now the future of the console market is less rosy as "cloud gaming" grows in popularity, something that Kutaragi also predicted -- along with mobile gaming years in advance.
"I'd often reflect on the future of technology, over 10 or 20 years, to predict new trends," although "many people found that hard to understand", he said.
The engineer now runs a start-up focused on robotics and artificial intelligence and teaches at a Japanese university.
"We are entering a world where everything can be calculated" by a computer with the help of AI, Kutaragi said.
For example, generative AI chatbot ChatGPT "exists because language has become computable", and similar technology is being used in sectors as diverse as medicine, music and visual art.
"Imagine if time and space were also computable," he said.
"For the moment, this is a possibility limited to the world of video games," but "imagine that we could move instantly to any place", Kutaragi said.
"What was once science fiction could become reality."