2026-10-26
PlayStation: How a $1 CD-ROM Toppled Nintendo's Empire — The Console Born from Public Humiliation and a Three-Second Speech ('299')
Ranked #31 on the 100 Products That Changed the World: PlayStation (1994, OVR 88.95 — Impact 92, Durability 92, Business 90, Scale 89, UX 87, Origin 85). Born after Nintendo publicly betrayed Sony at the 1991 CES, Ken Kutaragi's gray box replaced $15 cartridges with $1 CD-ROMs, aged up the gaming audience by a decade, and became the first console in history to ship 100 million units.
