In happier times, Sony was courting PC gamers with lavish magazine ads for its 'most popular CD-ROM titles'
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Well well well—what a difference, uh, 30 years makes, huh? While the Sony of 2026 is insisting that it should, or must, carry on with the execution of physical media for its forthcoming PlayStation 6, and has backed away from releasing its prestige games on PC, the Sony of 1996 was in a very different mindset.
Shortly after the release of the original PlayStation, Sony was still so eager to court PC gamers that it took out a 16 page ad supplement in this very magazine to hype up its "PlayStation mega-hits" with "CD-quality audio."
"Sony is just as committed to bringing great games to the PC as they are to creating cutting-edge PlayStation titles," the ad reads, as it explains that storied PC publisher Psygnosis had become a subsidiary of Sony Interactive. "In fact, with all the high-end design work coming out of Sony Interactive, PC gaming may never be the same..."
While many of the games featured throughout the 16 page ad insert are not exactly all-timers, it's fun to look back and see a few closely associated with the PlayStation console, namely WipEout and Twisted Metal, listed for PC. It also promotes a game called Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou as "one of Japan's most popular CD-ROM titles." (Hardcore Gaming 101, by contrast, says "the game wasn't much of a success.)
It's not exactly a gotcha to point out that the Sony of today is no longer talking up CD-ROMs or how awesome its PC games are. But stumbling upon this ad while I was looking at old issues of PC Gamer magazine still made me a bit wistful. It was cool when games came on discs and Sony was still eager enough to court PC gamers that it was boasting about games that "displayed in stunning SVGA with up to 32,768 colors" and "full 360 degree freedom of movement through a 3D world."
Enjoy this look back at a better time—or at least a time when "over 40 huge mazes to explore" was all it took to convince someone to buy your game.
Feed the Machine: New PC Games from Sony Interactive (PC Gamer #20 (US, January 1996)
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).