Even new machines were getting everything wrong. The 3DO lacked focus and software support, Atari's Jaguar only had one good game, Nintendo was dithering over something called 'Project Reality' (which would surface too late as the N64) and the Philips CDi couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a CD with a games machine added or a games machine with a CD player added. As it turned out, no-one cared.

It was, in short, a time of confusion. Would CD ROM be the next big thing, even though the data transfer was slower than with cartridges? Did the growth of the PC market mean people now wanted multimedia edutainment software rather than games? Were the kids happy with 2D scrolling shoot 'em ups or did they expect graphics to advance into 3D? What the hell was going on?

Simply by announcing a brand new console and saying "this is a games console not a multimedia unit, and it's going to have realistic graphics, and it's going to be cheap," Sony managed to turn the heads of a whole industry. It was like Moses tumbling down the slopes of Mount Sinai, the 10 commandments held aloft in his righteous arms. But with videogames.

Of course, being surrounded by confused competitors wouldn't have been enough to ensure the success of the PlayStation. Most importantly, Sony's R&D department, led by hardware guru Ken Kutaragi, designed a bloody good piece of kit.

At its heart were two very important realisations: that CD ROM was the storage medium of the future (the technology was already beginning to revitalise the Personal Computer market), and that 3D games were going to be huge. The PlayStation then, came equipped with a CD ROM drive as standard, and with internal architecture designed specifically to bung texture-mapped polygons around the screen like nobody's business.