First, Sony brought to market a system that was disc-based from the very start. That was an enormous leap forward. You only need to look at Final Fantasy VII to see that. Should Sony get credit for FF VII? Probably not, but we're talking about perception.

Second, in contrast to Nintendo, Sony supported and promoted third-party content. They put it front-and-center and used it to appeal to people who were getting weary of Mario and the limited amount of content you could get from cartridges. This is something we still see today, with Sony running ads for third-party games while Nintendo only advertises their own stuff. Even if Nintendo and Sony had all the same games, the image they seek to create has been different. In all honesty, that's something I fault Nintendo for as much as I credit Sony.

Yes, that's just perception, but it played a huge role with the fourth and fifth generations.

Sony, with the PS2, also decided to stop making consoles look like toys and they added in and promoted media features. Those were smart decisions on their part. That went a long way toward breaking the perception that gaming was only for children.

...but Nintendo made gaming fun :)

Dont say this because cool gaming = mainstream = end of good games and beginning of the end.

So if you want to say that Sony is killing the gaming industry then yes otherwhise dont say Sony made gaming cool.

Look at the games "cool" people dont play and you have the better games. The less  "cool" something is the more people do it that actually care about it and the better it is.  Same for movies etc.

Hype, hype and hype.

Anyway, there were plenty of games that made gaming "cool" on the NES, Master System, TurboGrafx, Genesis, Super Nintendo, 3DO and Neo Geo before the first PlayStation ever came out.  I should know as I bought them all when they first came out and still have a lot of them today.  Give me a great game over resolution any day.  Sony didn't make gaming cool, but I'm sure they'd like to take the credit for it.

Now, if you want to talk about violent video games, yes those escaladed hugely about the time the PS2/Xbox came out.  I guess that MS and Sony made gaming violent?

People who were not yet born during the NES/Atari 2600 eras , or were too young to remember, are the ones who believe in the myth that the PS brought adults into gaming. It is nothing more than a myth.

This, gaming was cool way before Sony came along.

Sony gets way too much credit for making gaming cool for non-children gamers.

The reality is 3rd parties are really what made Sony consoles successful.

ITT Sony haters.

The people who were gaming in those times were labeled as nerds, lol gaming definitely wasn't the IT thing at the time until PS came around. But let the Sony hate flow within you.