The original PlayStation didn’t just signal Sony’s rise to prominence in the video game industry, in a time where Nintendo had a firm grip on home consoles with countless memorable titles to their name – it ushered in a new era of memories that were going to be shared with Sony’s handsome machines for the next 30 years.
Benedict Redgrove, a London based photographer, has always focused on long-term projects surrounding human advances in technology, engineering and design, leading to collaborations with companies such as Sony, Apple, Airbus Aerospace. But it was because of the success of his celebrated project NASA: Past and Present Dreams of the Future, that Benedict was chosen to capture the fascinating evolution of the PlayStation in this new book PlayStation: The First 30 Years, created in collaboration with Sony and Read Only Memory.
The book features three decades of never before seen prototypes, consoles, controllers and design studies of the household name games console, from experimental mockups to the sleek consoles we all know and love today. Over 400 pages of large format photographs and insights from engineers and designers such as Ken Kutaragi, Teiyu Goto and Yujin Morisawa, Benedict’s photos create a strong emphasis on the beautiful architecture of videogame consoles and the imagination of human engineering through clean, clinical imagery that allows the technology to speak for itself.
“For me, these are also deeply personal objects. I remember playing PlayStation in my brother’s bedroom: the start-up sound, the flicker of the screen, the tiny green LED or the tray sliding out on the PS2 and gliding back with its cargo, ready to release its data,” says Benedict. “It was a ritual, a kind of theatre. A slow reveal, a tease, the warm-up before the main event.” It’s true, the PlayStation is a regular character not just in childhood memories, but the larger nostalgic media landscape. Marketed with the tagline ‘Live in your world. Play in ours’, the original PlayStation aimed to not just appeal to children, but a new generation of adults too, even going as far to create ‘PlayStation rooms’ in British night clubs.
