Retronauts - 739: Episode 739 Preview: Gaming in the Year 2006

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

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shockingly. I'm kind of calling it here because I feel like it would be a great discussion. So this stumbled at launch with a lackluster lineup and a very steep price. So depending on if you chose the 20 gigabit or the 60 gigabyte version, you'd be paying basically between 80, sorry,

$800 to $1,000 of today money. So the actual number price of the console is what is being charged today, but then you have to add inflation and everything. So very, very expensive. you'll naturally have to get two jobs. Oh, what's coming around the corner? Zero jobs.

Uh-oh, can't do that anymore. So Sony stumbles out of the gate. The surprising thing is they do catch up because we have the PS3 slim. Blu-ray wins the media race. And it's not incredibly close, but I believe like Xbox 360 is like 84 million and this is 81 million.

So it's way closer than I would have estimated given just how much of a disaster PS3 was out of the gate. It helps that no one in Japan bought an Xbox 360s, so the numbers in that region are definitely skewed. Yes, an entire nation not buying it. Yes. Unless you were a weirdo shooter, shooter otaku, then you were playing, you know, ESP Galuda and Mushihime Sama, I guess. But that was it.

No one else cared. Yeah, the PS3 was like interesting to me in that I never had one. Some friends of mine did, but it didn't really have the games that I was interested in. I don't even mean Western games. Like, I mean those kinds of shooters. Like, the PlayStation 3 library just has basically none of those kinds of genre, like the STGs. They all went to Xbox for whatever insane reason. So, I don't know.

It seemed like a really good system. If you liked RPGs or, like, really bizarre, they call them anime fighters now. But it was never really for me. Well, you know, at one point Sony was really good at presenting. and cataloging their classic titles and making them available for purchase. And the PS3 was a great platform for that. PS1 games, eventually PS2 games were available. And I feel like they really lost it when they stopped doing that.

I know there's a service now that I want nothing to do with that will allow you to play those games. But I miss just being able to download like Ape Escape a la carte, like in the past. Well, that was part of the price drop strategy, I believe, because the launch models had all these chips inside to support the PlayStation 1 and 2 games. And then by the time I got around in 2008 to buying a PS3, which, by the way, here it is. It's just sitting around. Nice. Massive.

Don't hurt yourself. By the time I bought my PS3 in 2008, it was slightly cheaper, but it didn't run PS2 games anymore, which is why I also have a PS2 down here, but I'm not going to pick it up because it's out of reach. But so, yeah, it's kind of a shame that the PS3 didn't work out as they wanted because it led them to on a confusing path. where they had to sort of take out the parts they wanted to put in there, and then they had to reset everything for PS4, and all of a sudden the PS4 didn't really play any of the games that came before it, and now we're in this weird place where some games,

some games from the Xbox generation still run on modern Xboxes, but nothing pre-PS3, nothing for PS3 or earlier, will run on a modern PS3. It's very frustrating. Yeah, Diamond, I also have a PS3 in a closet, and I'm only keeping it because there is so much, software on that thing that I will not have access to if I get rid of it. So it's a bummer. Yeah, the original PS3 model, I guess we should save a lot of this for the later conversation.

But it's crazy how much they crammed into that. All those USB ports, the ability to install Linux, like just all these bizarre things that, you know, you could tell it was engineered by engineers as opposed to people who necessarily love it for video games. It was just like, let's put all the cool tech in here and, you know, damn the torpedoes in terms of pricing and damn the torpedoes in terms of what it does for video games. But yeah, the hardware backward

compatibility was great. Having to buy an adapter to transfer your PS2 saves, I bought one and then it circulated all through the Zift Davis offices. I have no idea where it ended up. But like everyone used it to transfer their save files. It was just a strange.

system. Yeah, like if you bought the launch system, you had access to every kind of port available in 2006. Some of them were just a mystery to you. Like, I don't know what gets inserted in here. I'm not going to investigate. It's frankly, it's not of my business. Thank you.