We’re Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the UK PSX Launch with Net Yaroze Month!

This September sees the 25th Anniversary of the launch of Sony’s PlayStation in the Europe.

I didn’t get one straight away, but had read a lot about it prior to it’s Japanese launch in Edge magazine. At this point I was still plodding along with my Amiga 500.

But come late 1997, after most of the Amiga magazines had died out the year before, I succumbed to the lure of the PSX.

So I headed to Software Plus in Cambridge and bought a PlayStation. I also picked up a second-hand copy of WipeOut and headed home. While waiting for my bus, I popped into the newsagents by the bus station and thought I’d better pick up a PlayStation magazine as well – something I could read on the bus, while waiting the chance to set the PlayStation up.

The UK Official PlayStation Magazine came with a covermounted demo disc. As well has trailers and demos for the latest games, there was also something on there that seemed to be called Net Yaroze games.

The Net Yaroze was a development kit for the PlayStation which allowed anyone to create games for the machine. Though you had access to many of the PlayStation’s functions, you wasn’t able to read from disc, and crucially, the only other people that could play the games you’d made was if they also had a Net Yaroze System.

But there was another way for people to play Net Yaroze games – if the games were good enough, programmers would be able to get their games on the Official PlayStation Magazine cover disc.

For me this was great. You basically got free games with your magazine. As someone used to getting PD and Shareware games on the disks on Amiga Power et al, this was familiar territory.

Over the course of its lifetime, the magazine published nearly forty games. Some were meh, and some were amazing.

This month, to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the European launch of the PSX we are going to look at every Net Yaroze game (we think) that appeared on the European demo disc. And then rank them as we play them to find the ultimate Net Yaroze game!