PlayStation 3

Riding the runaway success of the PlayStation 2, Sony approached its successor with supreme confidence and a taste for the cutting edge. The result was the PlayStation 3, an ambitious and eccentric machine built around the Cell Broadband Engine, an unusual multi-core processor developed with IBM and Toshiba that was theoretically enormously powerful and, in practice, notoriously difficult to program.

Sony also bet the console on Blu-ray, including a drive to push its high-definition disc format against Toshiba's HD DVD. The bet paid off for movies, as the PS3's install base helped Blu-ray win that war, but it made the console ruinously expensive. Launching at up to 599 dollars, a year behind the Xbox 360, the PS3 arrived to sticker shock and a thin, delayed lineup. Developers wrestling with the Cell often produced multiplatform games that ran worse than on Microsoft's simpler hardware, and Sony's decade of dominance evaporated.

The recovery was patient and impressive. Price cuts and a redesigned Slim model made the console affordable, and Sony's first-party studios gradually unlocked the machine. Uncharted 2 set a new bar for cinematic action, The Last of Us delivered one of the most acclaimed games ever made, and Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet, and God of War III showcased what the hardware could do in expert hands. The free PlayStation Network, though less polished than Xbox Live, kept players online, until a catastrophic 2011 security breach took it down for weeks and exposed millions of accounts.

By the end the PS3 had fought back to a near-tie with the 360, each selling in the mid-80-million range. Its legacy is double-edged: a cautionary tale about arrogance, complexity, and pricing, and simultaneously the platform on which Sony's studios matured into the industry's premier makers of narrative blockbusters. The lessons of the PS3's hard early years directly shaped the developer-friendly, player-first PS4 that followed.