Alternate history: Sony don't join the console race

[pokoko]

SvennoJ said:

I lived through it (born in the mid 70s), gaming wasn't cool. I got bullied for it in high school and firmly put in the nerd category...

NES and SNES had the stigma they were for young kids. And even us playing on Amiga 500/PC was not cool. We though Wolfenstein and Doom were revolutionary, but the rest of the school, the popular kids had zero interest. Gaming had the same 'stigma' as AD&D and board games. 

Our exposure to PS1 came from Night clubs, going out to drink/dance and then finding PS1s playing Gran Turismo in the chill out area. So we got hooked on playing GT after the clubs closed.

Yes Sony created that market, and thanks to the exposure to PS1 which became accepted to be played by 16+, N64 faced a lot less resistance. But PS1 was the cool games machine we took to work to play in the break room, next to playing PC in Lan after work at work.

Yeah, claiming that the social aspect of gaming didn't change much with the PS1, and specifically FF7, seems like revisionist history.  I have a hard time believing people are being honest when they dispute how uncool gaming was during that period.  Once you reached a certain age, you didn't admit to liking video games or people were going to make fun of you, even if they played video games, too.  It was like saying that you still liked playing with your action figures.  In the court of public opinion, video games were purely for children.

I think this is confirmed by the fact that Nintendo still had the "for kids" tag years after the PS1 released and did not immediately benefit from the change in perception.  Would that way of thinking have changed over time regardless?  Yeah, but the sharp jump would not have been there.

I remember people gathering around mainstream magazines to look at the FF7 center spread ads.  

It was a literal game-changer.  They were specifically trying to appeal to teenagers and it worked.