The dragon looked a bit aggrieved, a small daisy it had somehow picked up clinging to its crooked horn.
Popolocrois Story. Release date: July 1996.
The art style of the trailer drew some reactions.
Whispers rippled through the audience. In 1996, a year dominated by polygons and lighting effects, a purely 2D hand-drawn RPG felt out of place.
"This game is adapted from the manga of the same name by Mr. Yosuke Tamori," Kazuo Hirai introduced. "It features fully hand-drawn animated cutscenes, co-produced by Japan's top animation studio, Production I.G. The CD-ROM capacity of the PlayStation allows for a vast amount of high-quality animation to be fully included."
Paul leaned in and whispered into David's ear. "Production I.G, the ones who did the Ghost in the Shell movie. It seems Sony still has some clout in mobilizing animation resources."
David didn't respond.
He stared at the screen, mentally assessing the game's prospects in the North American market.
Fairy-tale style, hand-drawn animation, pure JRPG.
Whether Western players would embrace it was questionable.
The game might sell well in Japan, but the North American market preferred the gritty realism of titles like Resident Evil.
The third trailer began immediately.
A desert, sandstorms, and a rust-colored sky. Three characters stood on the platform of an abandoned train station.
A young man in a red duster drew his pistol and aimed it at a distant dune.
Muzzle flash.
The camera zoomed out, revealing a post-apocalyptic world blending a Western aesthetic with steampunk elements.
The iconic whistling theme, a melody steeped in sorrow and wilderness romance, was accompanied by a guitar. For many Americans, it instantly evoked the classic whistling tune "Titoli" from Clint Eastwood's A Fistful of Dollars.
Wild Arms. Developed by Media.Vision. Release date: Late 1996.
"The Wild West meets magic and ancient ruins," Kazuo Hirai summarized concisely. "Media.Vision is a young development team. They're trying to integrate puzzle-solving and exploration into the traditional JRPG framework. Players will need to use each character's unique items to solve puzzles within the dungeons."
The three trailers finished playing. David quickly summarized his notes.
Three RPGs. June, July, and the end of the year.
They covered the entire second half of the year.
A tactical RPG, a fairy-tale RPG, and a Western RPG.
The genres were diverse, each targeting a different niche.
This arrangement was deliberate.
Sony wasn't just piling games together; they were filling out their genre portfolio.
The RPGs on the Jupiter platform centered around Square and Sega's Phantasy Star series, all big-budget productions.
Sony didn't have Square, so they were compensating with quantity and differentiation.
One game wasn't enough to compete, but three together—one of them was bound to hit the mark for some segment of the player base.
"The ambition is there," Paul wrote in his own notebook. "But their foundation is too weak. G-Craft and Media.Vision—these studios aren't even in the same league as Square in terms of fame or development prowess."
David agreed with the assessment, but he noticed another layer of information. "Sony is investing in talent. All these new titles from these studios are PlayStation exclusives. SCE is casting a wide net to nurture a first- and second-party camp. You won't see results in the short term, but over two or three years, after a few more titles are developed, the situation might change."
Kazuo Hirai, on stage, gave the audience little time to process.
The introductions for the three RPGs had just concluded, and the large screen switched again.
This time, the image jumped from the delicate lines of a JRPG to a completely different world.
An orange, anthropomorphic animal was running through a jungle.
It dashed through waterfalls, leaped onto floating wooden crates, and spun its body in place to smash the crates blocking its path.
As a crate shattered, a piece of fruit dropped out.
The orange creature charged forward, and as it hit the fruit, the fruit vanished, and the counter in the upper-right corner of the screen ticked up by one.
The colors were incredibly vibrant.
The 3D models were smooth and rounded.
The character's running animations were fluid and natural, and its expressions were exaggeratedly rich—rolling its eyes when it hit a wall and grinning foolishly when it found fruit.
Laughter rippled through the venue.
Crash Bandicoot.
Developer: Naughty Dog.
Release Date: September 1996.
"This is a platform action game tailored for PlayStation by Naughty Dog," Hirai introduced, his tone a bit more relaxed. "We hope Crash Bandicoot can become the representative character for PlayStation."
As the words faded, the gameplay demo on the big screen transitioned to a new level.
The perspective shifted from a side-scrolling platformer to a deep-field chase. An orange bandicoot sprinted toward the screen, pursued by a massive boulder. The player had to dodge obstacles on the path while running.
The pace was blistering. A sharp intake of breath echoed from the audience.
"They're taking on Mario," Paul blurted out.
David nodded. "Not just taking him on—they're going for the jugular. Nintendo showed off Super Mario 64 this morning: open world, free exploration. Then Sony comes out this afternoon with a bandicoot, linear levels, and high-speed sprinting. It's a completely different design philosophy."
"Mario is all about sandbox exploration," Paul analyzed. "Crash Bandicoot is about linear dashes. Miyamoto set the direction for 3D games this morning—freedom. Naughty Dog chose the opposite—compressing the space and increasing the density. Both approaches have their pros and cons. The advantage of linear levels is that every frame is meticulously designed and tested, keeping the player's focus locked in. The downside is the lack of freedom; the player's choices are confined to the track."
David scribbled a line in his notebook: PlayStation's Mario?
He added a question mark at the end.
The hurdles were too high for this bandicoot to become a platform mascot.
Mario had already dominated the platformer genre for a decade. Sega had Sonic, Pokémon, and Kirby. Nintendo still had Yoshi and Link. Each character had built a deep emotional bond with the players.
What right did an orange bandicoot, dropped from the sky, have to take their place?
But Naughty Dog's technical prowess was not to be underestimated. They had squeezed the PlayStation's hardware performance to an incredibly high degree—the number of polygons rendered on screen, the texture resolution, and the frame rate performance were unmatched among games already released on the PlayStation platform.
After the live demo, Kazuo Hirai added a piece of information. "Naughty Dog's engineers developed their own data streaming technology. The textures and model data for the game scenes are read in real-time from the optical disc as the player progresses, rather than being loaded into memory all at once. This makes the visual presentation of each level far superior to traditional pre-loading schemes."
Technical details.
The media reporters in the audience might not have understood them all, but the developers and analysts present immediately grasped the key point.
The PlayStation had only 2MB of main memory and 1MB of video memory, totaling 3MB.
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