DF Retro marathon: every PlayStation 1 launch game tested and compared

Do you find yourself at something of a loose end over the extended holiday weekend? Why not sit back and enjoy our first DF Retro marathon video, which combines multiple episodes of one of our most ambitious DF Retro projects yet into one mega-extended presentation. And it’s good stuff, with John Linneman and Audi Sorlie revisiting the epoch-making release of the original Sony PlayStation across 1994 and 1995, examining the history of the system and covering every single launch game across all three major territories: Japan, North America and Europe.

As it’s Digital Foundry, there are platform comparisons too for every game that also launched on competing consoles – and from my perspective, it’s always fascinating to bring DF-level scrutiny to another era, where the variations between games deployed on very different architectures are far more pronounced than today, where most consoles are basically built around very similar PC-style components.

Some of you may have seen this ‘content’ before, and DF Retro tier backers of our Supporter Program may have even seen this full two hour, 46 minute presentation in the past – so why bring it back two years later? Well, first of all, we consider it a great way to give a new focus to work that we’re immensely proud of, which otherwise languishes in the YouTube backwaters, mostly forgotten. And that’s a shame, as this video is as good as the day we made it!

Secondly, it’s an experiment in attempting to address a different audience. We launched DF Clips channel last year, which effectively serves to cut up every episode of DF Direct Weekly into smaller videos that appeal to people that probably aren’t that interested in watching three men talk about game technology for two hours each and every week. DF Clips turns every discussion point and supporter question into its own video and I’ve been surprised and delighted to see how successful it has been, and how much it’s grown in just seven months.

The marathon concept is a variation on the theme, brought to our attention by our friends and collaborators at the excellent My Life in Gaming retro channel, who have enjoyed even greater success by combining their episodes into extended presentations that presumably appeal to people looking for longer form videos. Like so much to do with YouTube and its unfathomable algorithms, we just don’t know why the idea works – but we’d like to try to find out, so thanks to Coury Carlson and Marc ‘Try4ce’ Duddleson for sharing this idea with us.

And that got me thinking that the video marathon concept could work for us in other ways too. Remember that time John tested every single console port of Doom ever made? Well, since then, more console Doom conversions have emerged, so another way to ‘re-surface’ that video is to extend it with the latest versions. And what about our analysis of every single Sega/Mega Drive 32X game ever made? Remarkably, there’s been some brilliant homebrew developments on the misbegotten peripheral, including a far superior Doom port and even a Tomb Raider proof-of-concept. We’ll have a good think about this, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video – we even did a 4K upscale on it to bypass YouTube’s miserly 1080p bitrate. Thanks for watching!