The first PlayStation also had a codename (which wasn’t used officially at the end of the day, EXCEPT for another hardware…) like PlayStation 2, but, thankfully, Sony had a second thought about the names.

The PlayStation was originally the Nintendo Play Station, where Sony would have made a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. However, after Nintendo broke up with Sony, the latter entered the console market on its own for revenge, resulting in the PlayStation. Internally, it was called PSX, though. This name ended up being used for other hardware: in Japan, there WAS a special PS2 which also worked like a digital video recorder, and it WAS called PSX!

Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, mentioned PlayStation in two different subjects. First, he shared an image from his archive that reads the following: „[…] September 11, 1995 – Sony has announced that Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA; Foster City, CA) is to produce the PlayStation in the US at a location yet to be decided, October 31, 1996 – SCE will cease production of the PlayStation in San Diego, CA, and relocate production to Japan. Once production in Japan has started, it will be increased to over 700 thousand units per month.” So initially, the PlayStation was manufactured in the US (for the US market at least – the Japanese launch happened earlier, in December ’94!).

Also the original PlayStation was manufactured in San Diego for a bit from the end of 1995 to the end of 1996. Then production was moved to Japan. pic.twitter.com/1ELs65DpfU

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 27, 2019

The other archive quote is about the original name of the PS2 : „February 15, 1999 – Sony is set to unveil a prototype version of its new PlayStation at a Japanese conference on March 2. The new console is set to be called PlayStation 2000. […]” Indeed, the original plans were to call the PlayStation 2 „PlayStation 2000,” so its shortened name wouldn’t be PS2 but… PS2K?

Thankfully, this weird thought was never applied, and Sony did not go with the 2000 craze (even Gran Turismo 3 was initially planned to be called Gran Turismo 2000…).

Source: Twitter

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