This may seem unimaginable for gamers of a certain age, but once upon a time, the best and most reliable way to try out a game before it launched was by going directly to an Electronics Boutique, a KB Toys, or any major department store with an electronics department, and playing it on a kiosk. And as a gamer of that certain age, this was exactly how I played Super Nintendo and Game Boy games for years, long before my mother could afford to buy us either (during the console wars, we were staunchly in the Sega camp). It was perfect. We would go to Sears, mom would go buy her clothes and various things for the house, and I and/or my best friend would hang out and play Mario Land, Mario World, or Donkey Kong Country for an hour at a mostly empty kiosk.

And then there was the weekend that there was a crowd. The Nintendo kiosk was gone, and in its place was something gray and alien. And there were dozens huddled around it. We got closer, and we found out why: It was a kiosk for something called a PlayStation, and the screen showed a fighting game made up of polygons moving in and around the background in 3D. And a crowd of people were beholding their first glimpse of the future.

On September 9, 1995, the original PlayStation was released in North America, and a new era of gaming had finally begun. But for many folks at the time, that new era had a herald. The hardcore folks who preordered the PS1 got the fancier disc with the T-Rex tech demo, but much of the general public got their first taste of the PS1 with the PlayStation Picks disc, which came bundled with the console at launch and was playing non-stop on kiosks across America. These were the games and demo videos meant to sell the PS1 to the unconverted, the ambassadors Sony would send to show the world pixels were on notice, polygons were the way forward.

What’s fascinating now, though, is looking at that roster of games and comparing it to the games people call out in 2025 as the games that defined the era, at least in the way early-adopter killer-app titles like the original Super Mario Bros did for the NES, Altered Beast and Revenge of Shinobi did for the Genesis, or Mario World and F-Zero did for the SNES. While the PlayStation all-stars (no, not those ones) on that disc are easy to account for (Twisted Metal, Tekken, Wipeout, Air Combat), there are 12 games represented on that disc–eight preview videos, and four playable demos–and not all of them are as widely remembered as, say, Tekken or Ridge Racer. So, what exactly happened to the PlayStation class of 1995? Some went on to be all-time classics, while others, not so much. Let’s go through them, one by one, and find out.

ESPN Extreme Games

• Released in North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)
• Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America

ESPN Extreme walked–er, well, biked and luged, really–so that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater could run. Right as “extreme sports” was becoming a thing culturally, PlayStation were right there at the forefront with the first game making a solemn attempt to tap in. ESPN Extreme itself owes a lot to EA’s Road Rash far as mechanics go–racing but being able to whack people off their vehicles. But where Road Rash was still beholden to leathery biker aesthetics (though the 3DO/Sega CD ports did inject grunge back into the mix), throwing roller blading, mountain biking, and street luges in with a punkier soundtrack got it closer to the zeitgeist. That official ESPN X-Games license only helped in that regard.

Where Are They Now?: After the ESPN license dropped, Sony churned out two more sequels under the names 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme (with the original even getting re-released as 1Xtreme) with more tracks, stages, and official partnership with real-life athletes. Once that third game hit, though, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater basically carried the extreme sports standard forward, and that was that.

As for the devs, Sony Interactive Studios was, essentially, one of Sony’s A-teams in the early days of the PlayStation, either directly developing or helping produce some of the biggest hits of the early days. They’d eventually splinter off and operate as 989 Studios for a while, and while most of their output wound up being Sony’s first-party sports titles, their name is on some serious heavy hitters. A couple of those will be showing up later in this list, but a few others include the first two Syphon Filters, JetMoto, and even the first Everquest. They also made Spawn: The Eternal. (We forgive them.) The studio was eventually folded back into being Sony Interactive again in 2005.

Image Credit: 10min Gameplay on YouTube

Jumping Flash

• Released In North America: 11/2/95
• Developer: EXACT/ULTRA

Jumping Flash is one of the true unsung heroes of the 32-bit era. Folks love to argue about which of the big groundbreaking 3D platformers was best between Nights: Into Dreams, Crash Bandicoot, and Mario 64, but Jumping Flash was first, and while graphically threadbare, it’s still best in a few areas. There’s nothing terribly special about the plot: An evil real estate mogul named Baron Aloha who looks like a Funko Pop of Ted Turner steals chunks from a planet to develop as exclusive property for himself, and a space council sends a giant, adorable robot rabbit named Robbit to save the world. The core gameplay is little more than a simple collect-a-thon, and yet, that collection is dependent on Robbit making death-defying jumps across wide-open stages, all while using FPS mechanics to take down anything in his way with lasers and fireworks.

Mechanically, it plays less like a Mario 64, and more like Baby’s First Metroid Prime. Aside from the lack of dual analog stick controls (it was 1995, after all), it’s doing so many things other developers wouldn’t figure out about running and jumping in 3D for years. The cherry on top is one of the finest soundtracks the PS1 had to offer, which is saying a lot. Spoiler alert, but arguably, this is the title that’s held up the best from the PS1’s entire launch library, and yet, it’s right down there with Philosoma and Kileak as the titles we talk about the least.

Where Are They Now?: Jumping Flash was at least successful enough to warrant a couple of sequels: the equally-as-good Jumping Flash 2 and Robbit Mon Dieu, which never even got a Western release.. According to former Sony Interactive president Shuhei Yoshida, the team behind PS2 launch title Fantavision once tried to grab the license for some sort of PSVR remake of the game, but the project simply fell through. The series has been dead in the water ever since. Though, shout outs to Team Asobi for giving poor, neglected Robbit some love with prominent cameos in Astro’s Playroom and 2024’s Astro Bot, even putting some extra respect on his name by labeling his VIP Bot in the latter “A true 3D platforming pioneer.”

Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube

Battle Arena Toshinden

• Released In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)
• Developer: Tamsoft

Even though Virtua Fighter had existed for about a year prior to the PlayStation, that series, to this day, has just never caught on in the West the way it’s damn near an institution in Japan, at a time when the much flashier Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats ruled arcades. As such, Toshinden very quickly became the de facto ambassador for 3D fighters for quite a lot of folks, and as a first look at 3D graphics in early 1995, it was, for a time, breathtaking. Sure, it almost immediately began to age like a fine milk the second people got their hands on Tekken, but hey, it was also a snazzy, fluid (for the time), stylish 3D weapon-based fighting game with an eclectic roster, at a time when there wouldn’t be any legitimate competition in that sphere until Bushido Blade and Soul Edge two years later.

For a hot second, it even felt like whip-wielding Russian dominatrix Sophia might actually be the game’s breakout star. Oh, but nooo, that scene-stealing tramp Lara Croft had to come along a year later and blow up her spot. In 2025, it’s a sluggish mess to play, though, still gotta hand it to ‘em that final boss Sho’s stage–taking place in front of an ominous Tower of Babel while Bach’s Toccata and Fugue plays during a wind storm–is a pure aura farm if ever there was.

Where Are They Now?: Oh, Takara/Tamsoft tried so very hard to milk Toshinden for all it was worth before its 15 minutes were up. The original game got a Remix version on Saturn, and a shockingly great Game Boy port. There were three progressively worse sequels. There was even an anime OVA directed by Masami Obari of Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture fame. But as mentioned, Tekken, Soul Blade, even Virtua Fighter all had juice that Toshinden just didn’t, and after those four sequels failed to win any additional hearts and minds, the series has been effectively dead since 1999, and nobody’s really clamoring for a comeback.

Image Credit: GamePlayStation on YouTube

Wipeout

• Released In North America: 11/21/95
• Developer: Psygnosis

The original Wipeout gets a lot right, really. There were lightning fast futuristic racing games before this, but by and large, the future they envisioned looks more like The Jetsons. Wipeout, on the other hand, looked and sounded like the inside of a London rave, 200 years from now, and that phenomenal art direction gave it an older, edgier fanbase than just about anything else on the system at launch. The vibes were absolutely immaculate. The actual game, on the other hand…well, it was fast, certainly, but it was just far too easy in that original game to scrape a wall and have all your momentum grind to a halt, in a way that made it way more unsatisfying than it should’ve been. These are problems that would be eradicated a year later, when Psygnosis dropped the utterly flawless Wipeout XL, a game so influential it basically kicked the door down for hardcore EDM to become a mainstream genre in the late 90s.

Where Are They Now?: Like EDM itself, Wipeout was never a blockbuster franchise, but the fans who stuck with it remained loyal as hell over the subsequent 30 years. There would be a new title on every PlayStation platform (as well as a just-okay N64 version nobody talks about), each one pushing the envelope of speed to the maximum limit of the hardware. And it would remain like this until Psygnosis–then having changed names to Studio Liverpool–was restructured in 2010, then fully shut down in 2012. The series would, at least, get something of an Irish funeral in 2017 with much of the original team contributing to Wipeout Omega Collection, which remastered tracks from Wipeout HD, Fury, and 2048 into 4K/60fps. But the real kicker was a patch in 2018 which added PSVR support. The game went from being a nice, polished package for the PS4, to one of the most breathtaking, adrenaline-spiking experiences you can have in any VR headset.

….so naturally, the PSVR2 is incompatible with original PSVR titles, and they still haven’t given Wipeout a new port, and just what are we even doing with that headset, Sony.

Image Credit: World of Longplays on YouTube

Destruction Derby

• Released In North America: 11/16/95
• Developer: Reflections Interactive

Out of the launch lineup, Destruction Derby is the title that feels the most redundant. Not that it’s a bad game, per se. For the time, it was actually one of the more technically impressive titles in the lineup, with the car destruction physics being surprisingly detailed in particular, as well as the fact that you could have almost two dozen cars on the road at one time. Thing is, if you wanted to drive around blowing up cars, Twisted Metal came out a week before this did. If you wanted a straight driving experience, Ridge Racer launched with the console. If you just plain wanted an alternative racing game, Wipeout and ESPN Extreme were there. That didn’t stop the game from being a success, but it definitely limited how much of a tail the thing would have after launch.

Where Are They Now?: The immediate sequel, Destruction Derby 2, was a pretty big improvement, leaning harder into the more southern fried, thrashy chaos vibes demolition derbies have in the U.S. The N64 version was even better still, taking some of the sluggish racing sim controls out of the equation. Real talk, I didn’t even realize there was a fourth game on PS1, Destruction Derby Raw, until writing this article. That apparently released in 2000, a month before the PS2 came out, and a general look at the critical reception shows that nobody missed a whole lot. The last game in the series, Destruction Derby Arenas, would release on PS2 in 2004, only notable for being one of the few, proud PS2 games you could play online, but it was completely immemorable otherwise, and Burnout 3: Takedown would eat its lunch in every single aspect later that year.

Image Credit: GamePlayStation on YouTube

Ridge Racer

• Released In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)
• Developer: Namco

In the same way that Tekken would be the PlayStation’s answer to Sega’s Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer was their answer to Virtua Racing and Daytona USA. Ridge Racer was faster, cooler, and just saying, one of these games let you play Galaga while the game loaded. Daytona may have had the banger theme song, but the counterpoint is the little secret that because Ridge Racer loaded the entire game while you actually played Galaga, once the game loaded, you could take the disc out, and put in any CD you wanted. If you weren’t zooming around tracks to the Mortal Kombat soundtrack in ‘95, you missed a golden opportunity. The point being, while Ridge Racer was a bit basic, the little things added up, and if you just wanted a straightforward racer for PS1, this was an easy, no-brainer purchase.

Where Are They Now?: You’d think, looking at the series timeline, that Namco had basically put out a new Ridge Racer every six months until about 2012, but in reality, a lot of what passes for new releases in Ridge Racer are the types of updates that would basically be free downloadable content nowadays. The major releases that mattered would be the excellent Ridge Racer Type 4, Ridge Racer V (a PS2 launch title), Ridge Racer on PSP, and Ridge Racer 6 (a 360 launch title). Those are the ones actually pushing the series forward, adding new features, and changing the mechanical focus (from arcade driving to drifting, mostly).

The others are generally various forms of remixes and riffs on those four. As mentioned, Bandai Namco has largely pumped the brakes on the series since around 2012, with the last release being a mobile title called Draw & Drift in 2016. Still, as long as there’s still somebody out there simping over Reiko Nagase, the series will never truly die.

Image Credit: NintendoComplete on YouTube

Tekken

• Released In North America: 11/8/95
• Developer: Namco

Well we can keep this one brief. If all of these games represent a high school graduating class, Tekken is the class president who went on to become a Hollywood director. No other game on the disk has maintained the staying power or popularity Tekken has. If anything, it’s just astonishing just how fast we went from the relatively timid Battle Arena Toshinden to the hard-hitting Tekken within two months, and the two-hit combo of Tekken 2 and Virtua Fighter 3 would take the whole 3D fighter genre into lightspeed not even a year later. Namco evolved this formula so fast in such a short period, and while the moves would get flashier, and Kazuya Mishima would get tossed into bigger and bigger volcanoes, the foundation of everything Tekken would become was already there in 1995.

Where Are They Now?: As of the time of writing, the Tekken series as a whole has sold over 60 million copies, 2024’s Tekken 8 has sold about 4 million copies, and it’s Bandai Namco’s best selling franchise by a wide margin (though the fact that Elden Ring is #2 at 40 million copies sold between only two games in the series is bananas).

So, yeah, they’re doing fair-to-middlin’.

Image Credit: MgameP1 on YouTube

Air Combat/Ace Combat

• Released In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)
• Developer: Namco

If Tekken was the class president of that first demo disc class, Air Combat gets the “Most Likely To Succeed” trophy. The first title in the series isn’t even a particularly great game–great soundtrack aside, it’s sparse and bland much of the time, at a time when your average arcade had the likes of G-LOC and After Burner. But the foundation of a great game is in there, and Namco would just keep building on that foundation slowly but steadily over the years, delivering consistently on a premise that, weirdly, you don’t really see much of outside this series. But they had to start somewhere, and the original Air Combat is more of an academic curiosity nowadays than a graphical showcase.

Where Are They Now?: Bandai Namco has basically dropped a new Ace Combat every 2-3 years since 1995, and aside from the free-to-play experiment we don’t talk about anymore, you can pick up any of them past the first, and be in for a solid time flying the unfriendly skies. The eighth installment was formally announced at the 2025 Game Awards, and it was genuinely one of the highlights of the night.

Image Credit: World of Longplays on YouTube

Twisted Metal

• Released In North America: 11/10/95
• Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America/SingleTrac Entertainment

For some reason, Sony decided that they needed two vehicular combat games during their launch window, and for some reason didn’t immediately decide to just run with the one with the evil ice cream truck in it. To be fair, the first Twisted Metal doesn’t go nearly as buck wild with its roster and features as the subsequent games would outside of old Sweet Tooth, but the game’s edgelord attitude still made it stand out, and the addition of guns and bombs to the mix makes it a little more freewheeling than Destruction Derby was. It’s not the best the series would have to offer, but there’s plenty of what the series would become right there from the start.

Where Are They Now?: As a game series, Twisted Metal has had kind of a rough time of it. Twisted Metal 2 is a stone-cold classic, while the series just kinda spins its wheels for 3 and 4. Twisted Metal: Black was a grim(m) and gritty triumph that got the series back on track, only for Sony to put the series on ice for another four years. Twisted Metal: Head-On on PSP is mediocre on its own, though it did get a director’s cut of sorts on PS2 that offered way more bang for the buck. The franchise goes back to sleep again until 2012, and a pretty great PS3 reboot.

It’s now been 13 years, and if one were to hazard a guess what the hold up is, the, uh… well, let’s use the word “colorful”… reputation of series creator David Jaffe in the industry probably has something to do with why Sony hasn’t decided to give the property another shot as a game. Instead, all the focus is now on the small screen, with Twisted Metal getting a live-action TV show adaptation on Peacock, and stunning everybody by actually being really, really fun, enough to get renewed for a third season, in fact.

Image Credit: RockinGlowStyx on YouTube

Warhawk

• Released In North America: 11/10/95
• Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America/SingleTrac Entertainment

What’s really striking as this list goes is just how many studios pulled double duty with the PS1’s launch, putting two games out, and trying to suss out what actually sticks. The other thing is how many of these games end up cannibalized by the others in the same genre. In this case, despite being a better, more dynamic aerial combat title than Air Combat, and the tongue-in-cheek tone granting it a grim charm, Warhawk is kind of a distant memory. While yes, we can maybe blame Twisted Metal for pulling SingleTrac’s focus away from The Little VTOL That Could, there were enough hard hitting, pulse pounding dog fights going on here to warrant more than being largely forsaken mere months after launch.

Where Are They Now?: The game wasn’t completely forgotten, in fairness. Sony did put out a pretty decent and successful multiplayer-only reboot in 2007, which holds the distinction of being the first physical game to ever get a digital release on the PlayStation Network. That, in turn, got a sci-fi spinoff called Starhawk which was also rock solid, though after so many complaints about Warhawk ‘07 being multiplayer-only, Starhawk got a single-player campaign that feels like a monkey’s paw curling on those complaints.

Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube

Philosoma

• Released In North America: 1/30/96
• Developer: G-Artists

Even compared to Jumping Flash, Philosoma is the genuine buried treasure of that first demo disc. At the time of its release, it was torn apart by critics for not being next-gen enough. It’s not hard to see why, really. Philosoma is, essentially, a Whitman’s Sampler of every single type of scrolling space shooter ever made up to that point. One stage will scroll left to right. The next will shift to a behind-the-ship POV. The next may take an isometric Zaxxon angle. While they’re all well done, and the array of weapon variants is a highlight, in 1995, scrolling shooters were the epitome of a played-out genre. It’d be the equivalent of putting out a new hero shooter now. In 2025, a cool, straightforward space shooter would be a pretty welcome sight by itself. But it wouldn’t be the decent gameplay that would make Philosoma stand out.

See, the story is that you play a pilot sent down to a colonized planet with a squadron led by a tactical AI, after the colonists put out a distress call. The planet seems deserted, but there’s a whole lot of insectoid creatures running around, many of which seem to have infected the colonists’ technology. As your crew starts scouring the planet for the colonists, one by one, the team’s AI starts pulling a HAL 9000 on your teammates, while still leading you deeper into the planet’s core. Eventually you find the colonists: liquified and strung up from the ceiling in a massive insect’s hive like something out of a Junji Ito book. And you find out that not only is the planet alive, but your ship has been commandeered to fertilize the planet so the alien life form at the core can be born. It is DEEPLY horrifying, but easily one of the most memorable space shooters of the generation because of it. At least, for the maybe dozens of folks who actually played it.

Where Are They Now?: So, weird enough, Philosoma does technically have a sequel: a survival horror/visual novel game on PS2 called Phase Paradox that never saw Western shores. Funny enough, despite never making it out of Japan, it’s fully voiced in English. It’s not great, but it does in fact pick up where Philosoma left off, and it’s honestly rather ambitious for the time, kind of a proto-David Cage game mixed with Parasite Eve.

As for the developers, they’d go on to do far less horrifying projects after. Two years later, G-Artists would be responsible for the extremely fun Intelligent Qube. Ten years later, the game’s composer, Kow Otani, would go on to score Shadow of the Colossus. One of the folks who worked on visual effects for Phase Paradox is some dude named Yoko Taro. Wonder if he ever went on to do anything. Anyway, safe to say, a third go-around for this universe isn’t in the cards. But what a ride.

Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube

Kileak: The DNA Imperative

• Released In North America: 9/9/95
• Developer: Genki

Last and most definitely least. FPS titles were still a pretty new genre in ‘95, especially on consoles, which makes it miraculous Jumping Flash got so much right. But even with that grace afforded, Kileak being miles and miles of copy/pasted hallways with the occasional robot to break things up is just the absolute worst, and the reward being a dozen or so audio logs from a mad scientist who thinks he found “the real Adam” isn’t nearly enough to keep going. If you hated Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, now imagine it was rendered on a PS1, but also they couldn’t afford Michael Fassbender, so they hired a malfunctioning Disneyland robot from the Hall of Presidents. That’s the level of production value you’re working with here. Unsurprisingly, the video that comes on the demo disc shows none of that, just the cool CG cutscenes of mechs arriving at the South Pole to take down a mad scientist, with a techno song bumping over it.

Where Are They Now?: Somehow, Kileak also got a sequel, called Epidemic (it goes by the far more ostentatious Kileak: The Blood 2: Reason in Madness in Japan) a year later. The big improvement is that now the hallways have texture. The emptiness problem is still very much in place, the acting is still abysmal, the shooting is still uninspiring. By the time it released, Doom, Hexen, and Alien Trilogy would all be on PS1. There is no excuse for an empty FPS map at this point. The developers, Genki, would go on to have a very long career pumping out consistent 6/10 games, but the only familiar names on their resume for Westerners would be the Tokyo Xtreme Racer games on Dreamcast/PS2, and, oddly enough, Katamari Forever on PS3, which was largely made of remixed stages from the previous games. Still, it netted them the best review scores of their career with near-universal 7s. Yay progress?

Image Credit: ZeroGamer2 on YouTube

 This may seem unimaginable for gamers of a certain age, but once upon a time, the best and most reliable way to try out a game before it launched was by going directly to an Electronics Boutique, a KB Toys, or any major department store with an electronics department, and playing it on a kiosk. And as a gamer of that certain age, this was exactly how I played Super Nintendo and Game Boy games for years, long before my mother could afford to buy us either (during the console wars, we were staunchly in the Sega camp). It was perfect. We would go to Sears, mom would go buy her clothes and various things for the house, and I and/or my best friend would hang out and play Mario Land, Mario World, or Donkey Kong Country for an hour at a mostly empty kiosk.And then there was the weekend that there was a crowd. The Nintendo kiosk was gone, and in its place was something gray and alien. And there were dozens huddled around it. We got closer, and we found out why: It was a kiosk for something called a PlayStation, and the screen showed a fighting game made up of polygons moving in and around the background in 3D. And a crowd of people were beholding their first glimpse of the future.On September 9, 1995, the original PlayStation was released in North America, and a new era of gaming had finally begun. But for many folks at the time, that new era had a herald. The hardcore folks who preordered the PS1 got the fancier disc with the T-Rex tech demo, but much of the general public got their first taste of the PS1 with the PlayStation Picks disc, which came bundled with the console at launch and was playing non-stop on kiosks across America. These were the games and demo videos meant to sell the PS1 to the unconverted, the ambassadors Sony would send to show the world pixels were on notice, polygons were the way forward.What’s fascinating now, though, is looking at that roster of games and comparing it to the games people call out in 2025 as the games that defined the era, at least in the way early-adopter killer-app titles like the original Super Mario Bros did for the NES, Altered Beast and Revenge of Shinobi did for the Genesis, or Mario World and F-Zero did for the SNES. While the PlayStation all-stars (no, not those ones) on that disc are easy to account for (Twisted Metal, Tekken, Wipeout, Air Combat), there are 12 games represented on that disc–eight preview videos, and four playable demos–and not all of them are as widely remembered as, say, Tekken or Ridge Racer. So, what exactly happened to the PlayStation class of 1995? Some went on to be all-time classics, while others, not so much. Let’s go through them, one by one, and find out. ESPN Extreme GamesReleased in North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)Developer: Sony Interactive Studios AmericaESPN Extreme walked–er, well, biked and luged, really–so that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater could run. Right as “extreme sports” was becoming a thing culturally, PlayStation were right there at the forefront with the first game making a solemn attempt to tap in. ESPN Extreme itself owes a lot to EA’s Road Rash far as mechanics go–racing but being able to whack people off their vehicles. But where Road Rash was still beholden to leathery biker aesthetics (though the 3DO/Sega CD ports did inject grunge back into the mix), throwing roller blading, mountain biking, and street luges in with a punkier soundtrack got it closer to the zeitgeist. That official ESPN X-Games license only helped in that regard.Where Are They Now?: After the ESPN license dropped, Sony churned out two more sequels under the names 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme (with the original even getting re-released as 1Xtreme) with more tracks, stages, and official partnership with real-life athletes. Once that third game hit, though, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater basically carried the extreme sports standard forward, and that was that.As for the devs, Sony Interactive Studios was, essentially, one of Sony’s A-teams in the early days of the PlayStation, either directly developing or helping produce some of the biggest hits of the early days. They’d eventually splinter off and operate as 989 Studios for a while, and while most of their output wound up being Sony’s first-party sports titles, their name is on some serious heavy hitters. A couple of those will be showing up later in this list, but a few others include the first two Syphon Filters, JetMoto, and even the first Everquest. They also made Spawn: The Eternal. (We forgive them.) The studio was eventually folded back into being Sony Interactive again in 2005.Image Credit: 10min Gameplay on YouTube Jumping FlashReleased In North America: 11/2/95Developer: EXACT/ULTRAJumping Flash is one of the true unsung heroes of the 32-bit era. Folks love to argue about which of the big groundbreaking 3D platformers was best between Nights: Into Dreams, Crash Bandicoot, and Mario 64, but Jumping Flash was first, and while graphically threadbare, it’s still best in a few areas. There’s nothing terribly special about the plot: An evil real estate mogul named Baron Aloha who looks like a Funko Pop of Ted Turner steals chunks from a planet to develop as exclusive property for himself, and a space council sends a giant, adorable robot rabbit named Robbit to save the world. The core gameplay is little more than a simple collect-a-thon, and yet, that collection is dependent on Robbit making death-defying jumps across wide-open stages, all while using FPS mechanics to take down anything in his way with lasers and fireworks.Mechanically, it plays less like a Mario 64, and more like Baby’s First Metroid Prime. Aside from the lack of dual analog stick controls (it was 1995, after all), it’s doing so many things other developers wouldn’t figure out about running and jumping in 3D for years. The cherry on top is one of the finest soundtracks the PS1 had to offer, which is saying a lot. Spoiler alert, but arguably, this is the title that’s held up the best from the PS1’s entire launch library, and yet, it’s right down there with Philosoma and Kileak as the titles we talk about the least.Where Are They Now?: Jumping Flash was at least successful enough to warrant a couple of sequels: the equally-as-good Jumping Flash 2 and Robbit Mon Dieu, which never even got a Western release.. According to former Sony Interactive president Shuhei Yoshida, the team behind PS2 launch title Fantavision once tried to grab the license for some sort of PSVR remake of the game, but the project simply fell through. The series has been dead in the water ever since. Though, shout outs to Team Asobi for giving poor, neglected Robbit some love with prominent cameos in Astro’s Playroom and 2024’s Astro Bot, even putting some extra respect on his name by labeling his VIP Bot in the latter “A true 3D platforming pioneer.”Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube Battle Arena ToshindenReleased In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)Developer: TamsoftEven though Virtua Fighter had existed for about a year prior to the PlayStation, that series, to this day, has just never caught on in the West the way it’s damn near an institution in Japan, at a time when the much flashier Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats ruled arcades. As such, Toshinden very quickly became the de facto ambassador for 3D fighters for quite a lot of folks, and as a first look at 3D graphics in early 1995, it was, for a time, breathtaking. Sure, it almost immediately began to age like a fine milk the second people got their hands on Tekken, but hey, it was also a snazzy, fluid (for the time), stylish 3D weapon-based fighting game with an eclectic roster, at a time when there wouldn’t be any legitimate competition in that sphere until Bushido Blade and Soul Edge two years later.For a hot second, it even felt like whip-wielding Russian dominatrix Sophia might actually be the game’s breakout star. Oh, but nooo, that scene-stealing tramp Lara Croft had to come along a year later and blow up her spot. In 2025, it’s a sluggish mess to play, though, still gotta hand it to ‘em that final boss Sho’s stage–taking place in front of an ominous Tower of Babel while Bach’s Toccata and Fugue plays during a wind storm–is a pure aura farm if ever there was.Where Are They Now?: Oh, Takara/Tamsoft tried so very hard to milk Toshinden for all it was worth before its 15 minutes were up. The original game got a Remix version on Saturn, and a shockingly great Game Boy port. There were three progressively worse sequels. There was even an anime OVA directed by Masami Obari of Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture fame. But as mentioned, Tekken, Soul Blade, even Virtua Fighter all had juice that Toshinden just didn’t, and after those four sequels failed to win any additional hearts and minds, the series has been effectively dead since 1999, and nobody’s really clamoring for a comeback.Image Credit: GamePlayStation on YouTube WipeoutReleased In North America: 11/21/95Developer: PsygnosisThe original Wipeout gets a lot right, really. There were lightning fast futuristic racing games before this, but by and large, the future they envisioned looks more like The Jetsons. Wipeout, on the other hand, looked and sounded like the inside of a London rave, 200 years from now, and that phenomenal art direction gave it an older, edgier fanbase than just about anything else on the system at launch. The vibes were absolutely immaculate. The actual game, on the other hand…well, it was fast, certainly, but it was just far too easy in that original game to scrape a wall and have all your momentum grind to a halt, in a way that made it way more unsatisfying than it should’ve been. These are problems that would be eradicated a year later, when Psygnosis dropped the utterly flawless Wipeout XL, a game so influential it basically kicked the door down for hardcore EDM to become a mainstream genre in the late 90s.Where Are They Now?: Like EDM itself, Wipeout was never a blockbuster franchise, but the fans who stuck with it remained loyal as hell over the subsequent 30 years. There would be a new title on every PlayStation platform (as well as a just-okay N64 version nobody talks about), each one pushing the envelope of speed to the maximum limit of the hardware. And it would remain like this until Psygnosis–then having changed names to Studio Liverpool–was restructured in 2010, then fully shut down in 2012. The series would, at least, get something of an Irish funeral in 2017 with much of the original team contributing to Wipeout Omega Collection, which remastered tracks from Wipeout HD, Fury, and 2048 into 4K/60fps. But the real kicker was a patch in 2018 which added PSVR support. The game went from being a nice, polished package for the PS4, to one of the most breathtaking, adrenaline-spiking experiences you can have in any VR headset.….so naturally, the PSVR2 is incompatible with original PSVR titles, and they still haven’t given Wipeout a new port, and just what are we even doing with that headset, Sony.Image Credit: World of Longplays on YouTube Destruction DerbyReleased In North America: 11/16/95Developer: Reflections InteractiveOut of the launch lineup, Destruction Derby is the title that feels the most redundant. Not that it’s a bad game, per se. For the time, it was actually one of the more technically impressive titles in the lineup, with the car destruction physics being surprisingly detailed in particular, as well as the fact that you could have almost two dozen cars on the road at one time. Thing is, if you wanted to drive around blowing up cars, Twisted Metal came out a week before this did. If you wanted a straight driving experience, Ridge Racer launched with the console. If you just plain wanted an alternative racing game, Wipeout and ESPN Extreme were there. That didn’t stop the game from being a success, but it definitely limited how much of a tail the thing would have after launch.Where Are They Now?: The immediate sequel, Destruction Derby 2, was a pretty big improvement, leaning harder into the more southern fried, thrashy chaos vibes demolition derbies have in the U.S. The N64 version was even better still, taking some of the sluggish racing sim controls out of the equation. Real talk, I didn’t even realize there was a fourth game on PS1, Destruction Derby Raw, until writing this article. That apparently released in 2000, a month before the PS2 came out, and a general look at the critical reception shows that nobody missed a whole lot. The last game in the series, Destruction Derby Arenas, would release on PS2 in 2004, only notable for being one of the few, proud PS2 games you could play online, but it was completely immemorable otherwise, and Burnout 3: Takedown would eat its lunch in every single aspect later that year.Image Credit: GamePlayStation on YouTube Ridge RacerReleased In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)Developer: NamcoIn the same way that Tekken would be the PlayStation’s answer to Sega’s Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer was their answer to Virtua Racing and Daytona USA. Ridge Racer was faster, cooler, and just saying, one of these games let you play Galaga while the game loaded. Daytona may have had the banger theme song, but the counterpoint is the little secret that because Ridge Racer loaded the entire game while you actually played Galaga, once the game loaded, you could take the disc out, and put in any CD you wanted. If you weren’t zooming around tracks to the Mortal Kombat soundtrack in ‘95, you missed a golden opportunity. The point being, while Ridge Racer was a bit basic, the little things added up, and if you just wanted a straightforward racer for PS1, this was an easy, no-brainer purchase.Where Are They Now?: You’d think, looking at the series timeline, that Namco had basically put out a new Ridge Racer every six months until about 2012, but in reality, a lot of what passes for new releases in Ridge Racer are the types of updates that would basically be free downloadable content nowadays. The major releases that mattered would be the excellent Ridge Racer Type 4, Ridge Racer V (a PS2 launch title), Ridge Racer on PSP, and Ridge Racer 6 (a 360 launch title). Those are the ones actually pushing the series forward, adding new features, and changing the mechanical focus (from arcade driving to drifting, mostly).The others are generally various forms of remixes and riffs on those four. As mentioned, Bandai Namco has largely pumped the brakes on the series since around 2012, with the last release being a mobile title called Draw & Drift in 2016. Still, as long as there’s still somebody out there simping over Reiko Nagase, the series will never truly die.Image Credit: NintendoComplete on YouTube TekkenReleased In North America: 11/8/95Developer: NamcoWell we can keep this one brief. If all of these games represent a high school graduating class, Tekken is the class president who went on to become a Hollywood director. No other game on the disk has maintained the staying power or popularity Tekken has. If anything, it’s just astonishing just how fast we went from the relatively timid Battle Arena Toshinden to the hard-hitting Tekken within two months, and the two-hit combo of Tekken 2 and Virtua Fighter 3 would take the whole 3D fighter genre into lightspeed not even a year later. Namco evolved this formula so fast in such a short period, and while the moves would get flashier, and Kazuya Mishima would get tossed into bigger and bigger volcanoes, the foundation of everything Tekken would become was already there in 1995.Where Are They Now?: As of the time of writing, the Tekken series as a whole has sold over 60 million copies, 2024’s Tekken 8 has sold about 4 million copies, and it’s Bandai Namco’s best selling franchise by a wide margin (though the fact that Elden Ring is #2 at 40 million copies sold between only two games in the series is bananas).So, yeah, they’re doing fair-to-middlin’.Image Credit: MgameP1 on YouTube Air Combat/Ace CombatReleased In North America: 9/9/95 (launch title)Developer: NamcoIf Tekken was the class president of that first demo disc class, Air Combat gets the “Most Likely To Succeed” trophy. The first title in the series isn’t even a particularly great game–great soundtrack aside, it’s sparse and bland much of the time, at a time when your average arcade had the likes of G-LOC and After Burner. But the foundation of a great game is in there, and Namco would just keep building on that foundation slowly but steadily over the years, delivering consistently on a premise that, weirdly, you don’t really see much of outside this series. But they had to start somewhere, and the original Air Combat is more of an academic curiosity nowadays than a graphical showcase.Where Are They Now?: Bandai Namco has basically dropped a new Ace Combat every 2-3 years since 1995, and aside from the free-to-play experiment we don’t talk about anymore, you can pick up any of them past the first, and be in for a solid time flying the unfriendly skies. The eighth installment was formally announced at the 2025 Game Awards, and it was genuinely one of the highlights of the night.Image Credit: World of Longplays on YouTube Twisted MetalReleased In North America: 11/10/95Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America/SingleTrac EntertainmentFor some reason, Sony decided that they needed two vehicular combat games during their launch window, and for some reason didn’t immediately decide to just run with the one with the evil ice cream truck in it. To be fair, the first Twisted Metal doesn’t go nearly as buck wild with its roster and features as the subsequent games would outside of old Sweet Tooth, but the game’s edgelord attitude still made it stand out, and the addition of guns and bombs to the mix makes it a little more freewheeling than Destruction Derby was. It’s not the best the series would have to offer, but there’s plenty of what the series would become right there from the start.Where Are They Now?: As a game series, Twisted Metal has had kind of a rough time of it. Twisted Metal 2 is a stone-cold classic, while the series just kinda spins its wheels for 3 and 4. Twisted Metal: Black was a grim(m) and gritty triumph that got the series back on track, only for Sony to put the series on ice for another four years. Twisted Metal: Head-On on PSP is mediocre on its own, though it did get a director’s cut of sorts on PS2 that offered way more bang for the buck. The franchise goes back to sleep again until 2012, and a pretty great PS3 reboot.It’s now been 13 years, and if one were to hazard a guess what the hold up is, the, uh… well, let’s use the word “colorful”… reputation of series creator David Jaffe in the industry probably has something to do with why Sony hasn’t decided to give the property another shot as a game. Instead, all the focus is now on the small screen, with Twisted Metal getting a live-action TV show adaptation on Peacock, and stunning everybody by actually being really, really fun, enough to get renewed for a third season, in fact.Image Credit: RockinGlowStyx on YouTube WarhawkReleased In North America: 11/10/95Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America/SingleTrac EntertainmentWhat’s really striking as this list goes is just how many studios pulled double duty with the PS1’s launch, putting two games out, and trying to suss out what actually sticks. The other thing is how many of these games end up cannibalized by the others in the same genre. In this case, despite being a better, more dynamic aerial combat title than Air Combat, and the tongue-in-cheek tone granting it a grim charm, Warhawk is kind of a distant memory. While yes, we can maybe blame Twisted Metal for pulling SingleTrac’s focus away from The Little VTOL That Could, there were enough hard hitting, pulse pounding dog fights going on here to warrant more than being largely forsaken mere months after launch.Where Are They Now?: The game wasn’t completely forgotten, in fairness. Sony did put out a pretty decent and successful multiplayer-only reboot in 2007, which holds the distinction of being the first physical game to ever get a digital release on the PlayStation Network. That, in turn, got a sci-fi spinoff called Starhawk which was also rock solid, though after so many complaints about Warhawk ‘07 being multiplayer-only, Starhawk got a single-player campaign that feels like a monkey’s paw curling on those complaints.Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube PhilosomaReleased In North America: 1/30/96Developer: G-ArtistsEven compared to Jumping Flash, Philosoma is the genuine buried treasure of that first demo disc. At the time of its release, it was torn apart by critics for not being next-gen enough. It’s not hard to see why, really. Philosoma is, essentially, a Whitman’s Sampler of every single type of scrolling space shooter ever made up to that point. One stage will scroll left to right. The next will shift to a behind-the-ship POV. The next may take an isometric Zaxxon angle. While they’re all well done, and the array of weapon variants is a highlight, in 1995, scrolling shooters were the epitome of a played-out genre. It’d be the equivalent of putting out a new hero shooter now. In 2025, a cool, straightforward space shooter would be a pretty welcome sight by itself. But it wouldn’t be the decent gameplay that would make Philosoma stand out.See, the story is that you play a pilot sent down to a colonized planet with a squadron led by a tactical AI, after the colonists put out a distress call. The planet seems deserted, but there’s a whole lot of insectoid creatures running around, many of which seem to have infected the colonists’ technology. As your crew starts scouring the planet for the colonists, one by one, the team’s AI starts pulling a HAL 9000 on your teammates, while still leading you deeper into the planet’s core. Eventually you find the colonists: liquified and strung up from the ceiling in a massive insect’s hive like something out of a Junji Ito book. And you find out that not only is the planet alive, but your ship has been commandeered to fertilize the planet so the alien life form at the core can be born. It is DEEPLY horrifying, but easily one of the most memorable space shooters of the generation because of it. At least, for the maybe dozens of folks who actually played it.Where Are They Now?: So, weird enough, Philosoma does technically have a sequel: a survival horror/visual novel game on PS2 called Phase Paradox that never saw Western shores. Funny enough, despite never making it out of Japan, it’s fully voiced in English. It’s not great, but it does in fact pick up where Philosoma left off, and it’s honestly rather ambitious for the time, kind of a proto-David Cage game mixed with Parasite Eve.As for the developers, they’d go on to do far less horrifying projects after. Two years later, G-Artists would be responsible for the extremely fun Intelligent Qube. Ten years later, the game’s composer, Kow Otani, would go on to score Shadow of the Colossus. One of the folks who worked on visual effects for Phase Paradox is some dude named Yoko Taro. Wonder if he ever went on to do anything. Anyway, safe to say, a third go-around for this universe isn’t in the cards. But what a ride.Image Credit: OldsXCool on YouTube Kileak: The DNA ImperativeReleased In North America: 9/9/95Developer: GenkiLast and most definitely least. FPS titles were still a pretty new genre in ‘95, especially on consoles, which makes it miraculous Jumping Flash got so much right. But even with that grace afforded, Kileak being miles and miles of copy/pasted hallways with the occasional robot to break things up is just the absolute worst, and the reward being a dozen or so audio logs from a mad scientist who thinks he found “the real Adam” isn’t nearly enough to keep going. If you hated Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, now imagine it was rendered on a PS1, but also they couldn’t afford Michael Fassbender, so they hired a malfunctioning Disneyland robot from the Hall of Presidents. That’s the level of production value you’re working with here. Unsurprisingly, the video that comes on the demo disc shows none of that, just the cool CG cutscenes of mechs arriving at the South Pole to take down a mad scientist, with a techno song bumping over it.Where Are They Now?: Somehow, Kileak also got a sequel, called Epidemic (it goes by the far more ostentatious Kileak: The Blood 2: Reason in Madness in Japan) a year later. The big improvement is that now the hallways have texture. The emptiness problem is still very much in place, the acting is still abysmal, the shooting is still uninspiring. By the time it released, Doom, Hexen, and Alien Trilogy would all be on PS1. There is no excuse for an empty FPS map at this point. The developers, Genki, would go on to have a very long career pumping out consistent 6/10 games, but the only familiar names on their resume for Westerners would be the Tokyo Xtreme Racer games on Dreamcast/PS2, and, oddly enough, Katamari Forever on PS3, which was largely made of remixed stages from the previous games. Still, it netted them the best review scores of their career with near-universal 7s. Yay progress?Image Credit: ZeroGamer2 on YouTube  Read MoreGameSpot – All Content