Sony celebrates Playstation's 20th anniversary in style

Sony celebrates Playstation's 20th anniversary in style

The original Playstation was a mistake. The story goes that Nintendo wanted to create a CD-based system as an add-on to the SNES (similar to how the Sega CD hooked up to the Mega Drive). So they went around looking for partners and settled on Sony. Sony then went on to create something similar to the Playstation but Nintendo for some reason didn't like it (they went to Phillips instead) and broke up the partnership with Sony.

The breaking up of the partnership reportedly infuriated Sony's president at the time, so much so that he decided to carry on the development of the project despite Sony originally having no intention of entering the video game market in the first place. From then on, the rest is history. The Playstation went on to solidly thump its competitors, the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64. It went on to break numerous records and its successor, the Playstation 2, was even once regarded as a piece of hardware so advanced that it could be use for military purposes. Ironically, while PS2s were never proven to be used by any military...the PS3 was. While Sony's chokehold in the console marketplace waned during the PS3 era due to the Xbox 360's favored status by many developers, the PS4 has since regained Sony's dominance over its competitors and from the looks of things is set to do so for years to come.

All that will probably make this limited edition Playstation 4 worth a ton of money in the future (if you decide to keep it for collection purposes). To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Sony's original gaming box, they're releasing a very limited edition PS4 decked in the familiar Playstation grey. There'll be only 12300 pieces of the system made and each one will have its very own teeny plate with its number engraved on it. Why 12300? We don't know why Sony settled on the 12300 instead of 1230 or even 123 but we do know that the numbers 1,2 and 3 have special meaning since they original Playstation launched in Japan on December 3 1994 (hence the 123 part). Packed with the set will be the PS4's Playstation Camera and a regular PS4 Dualshock 4 controller, both in the same color scheme as the console itself.

So how do you get one? Sony's not telling yet. All they will say is to wait for an announcement coming at the Playstation Experience event keynote speech this Saturday at 10am Pacific Time (2am on Sunday morning for us in Singapore).

If you don't want to wait, Sony Asia will be making an announcement (at their Anime Festival Asia press conference) for it later today on Twitch, at 1430hrs. You can watch it on here. We do know the price for the local set is at $689. So in the meantime, if you're interested, either start camping out at the Sony stores or better start making plans to import.