PlayStation 2

By the turn of the millennium Sony no longer needed to prove anything, and the PlayStation 2 arrived carrying the momentum of the most successful console in history. Released in Japan in March 2000, it inherited an enormous installed base of loyal owners and a third-party industry already trained to develop for Sony hardware.

At its heart was the Emotion Engine, a custom processor Kutaragi's team designed to push huge volumes of geometry, paired with a built-in DVD-ROM drive. That drive was a masterstroke: in 2000, standalone DVD players were still expensive, so the PS2 doubled as one of the cheapest ways to watch films at home. Millions bought it as a movie player and discovered a games machine inside. Backward compatibility with the original PlayStation's vast library sealed the deal, giving buyers thousands of titles on day one.

The hardware was famously difficult to program, but developers who mastered it delivered landmarks. Grand Theft Auto III turned the open world into the defining genre of the decade, Metal Gear Solid 2 pushed cinematic storytelling, and Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy X, God of War, Gran Turismo, and the Kingdom Hearts and Ratchet & Clank series filled a library of almost bottomless depth. Its EyeToy camera and SingStar and Guitar Hero peripherals broadened the audience further.

Commercially it was untouchable. The PS2 outsold every rival combined, weathered the launches of the Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox, and eventually moved over 155 million units, a record that still stands. Sony continued manufacturing it for thirteen years, long after its successor arrived.

Its legacy is one of total market dominance and cultural saturation. The PS2 normalized DVD, made mature open-world and cinematic games the industry's center of gravity, and demonstrated the enduring power of a large library and backward compatibility. For a decade it was, quite simply, the machine that defined home gaming.