Sony's video game empire was born on this very day a decade and a half ago, in Japan. That's when the very first PlayStation console, or the PSX as some techie dorks (like myself) still call it by. And to say it changed the course of video game events is a vast understatement.

Here's a fun fact that I'm sure many are not aware of: the PlayStation was originally a Nintendo thing! No kidding; when Sega came out with their CD-ROM attachment for the Genesis, which was actually beating out Nintendo's SNES in certain markets, the house that Mario built was desperate to save face and market-share, so they turned to some experts and potential allies, that being Sony (whom they were already doing business with; it was Sony who created and supplied the SNES's sound chips). Thing is, Sony was secretly been gunning for Nintendo's top spot as the king of video games; rumor has it that when the Game Boy came out just a few years prior, the head of Sony flipped his lid, claiming that a portable video game device should be a Sony product and no one else's (after all, they had pioneered the portable music playing device, i.e. the Walkman).

Thus began their obsession, and that meant pulling out every trick in the book, no matter how dirty. Which in this case was a loophole that would allow Sony as they made the SNES CD-ROM attachment to create their own console that could play Nintendo's games but without paying some kind of licensing fee. It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but if you check out The Ultimate History of Video Games, you'll find out the whole story. Anyhow, Nintendo figured this out at the last possible second, and decided to develop a relationship with Phillips that went absolutely nowhere, and leaving Sony in the dust plus even angrier than before. That fostered a "oh yeah, we'll show you we can do it all my ourselves!" which in turn led to the PlayStation X project, and the rest they say is history!

Sony has set up a snazzy little site, which is all in Japanese, but it's mostly just a hardware gallery, where the pictures speak from themselves. Some still look just as sexy today as when they first came out (the PSone is flat-out beautiful, though I'm also a great fan of the PStwo), whereas some are just eye-sores (only recently have I gotten over how butt-ugly the original PS2 looks).