PixlBit

Sony may be the once and future king (we'll see), but they've had some stinkers for ad campaigns...

Sony was on top of the mountain leading into the next generation. In the couple of years leading up to its launch in the fall of 2000, it seemed as if no one even cared that SEGA had kicked things off early with their Dreamcast console. All people in the video games media wanted to talk about was the PlayStation 2, which was a great thing for Sony, considering that they once again fumbled the ball with their opening campaign.

Sure, the company did some visually interesting commercials to roll out the PS2. Sure, they hired David Lynch to direct some of them. However, they were all kind of weird, and in the case of the leading ad, completely confusing. The original television advertisement was not actually for the PS2, but instead showed off the hyper-futuristic PS9, which ended by showing the PS2 at the very last moment with the tagline “the beginning.”

This confused a great many people, who inundated video game stores trying to pre-order the PS9.

Oh, and if you thought things were weird in America, you should have seen what Sony UK cooked up for their print ads in Europe.

However, this period of head scratching soon passed, and like the PlayStation before it the thing that would win the day for Sony would be its strong library of games. While third parties such as Capcom, Konami, and Squaresoft would pump out modern classics for the black monolith machine, Sony had developed a great relationship with first party developers like Naughty Dog and Insomniac. While Insomniac was technically an independent company, they had worked closely with Sony since the early days, and their Ratchet and Clank series was marketed as a PS2 in-house franchise.

And of course, we can’t understate how massive the Grand Theft Auto games were for the system, as the PlayStation 2 was the only place to play GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City for years.

This gave way to the rather inspired “Live in your world, play in ours,” campaign, which looked iconic in print ads thanks to the PlayStation face buttons that were worked into the slogan. Even with six years in the cycle and competition from three other consoles (the Dreamcast, Gamecube and Microsoft’s freshman release of the Xbox), Sony easily won the generation. The PS2 remained active for over ten years and helped maintain Sony’s dominance over the video game industry.

That’s when they got cocky.