Platform: PlayStation

In the North American commercials for Playstation, Sony hid multiple subliminal messages. The more obvious was "U R NOT E" - you are not ready (red "E"). Some were cheat codes for games, and another was "E NOS LIVES" meaning "Ready ninth of September", revealing the PS1's release date.

The console was originally planned as a CD-Drive add on for the Super Nintendo called the SNES-CD. The plan fell through, resulting in the PlayStation's creation and Nintendo doing a deal with Phillips instead.

A promotional video for the Sony Playstation appeared on a demo disc for the UK Official Playstation Magazine, known simply as "Elightenment". The video is a parody of Chinese Kung Fu movies with a man seeking to advance to "the higher level" being instructed by and old master about various Playstation peripherals. Very little is known about the video's production and it does not appear to have been shown anywhere outside of demo discs.

Sony made a special black PlayStation known as the Net Yaroze that allowed owners to develop games. It cost 750 USD by mail order in 1997 and is no longer available today.

The original PlayStation is often mistakenly referred to as PSX, while in reality PSX is a totally different system. It is a Sony digital video recorder with a fully integrated PlayStation 2 and was only released in Japan.

The buttons on the original playstation controller had a very distinct purpose in their design, according to their designer Teiyu Goto.
The triangle represented a person's viewpoint, meant to look like a head. The square was meant to symbolize a map. The circle and X were meant to represent "yes" and "no" respectively, and it was thought that games released on the Playstation would use controls based on the meaning of these symbols.

While developing the PlayStation, Sony went through at least 3 dozen different logo ideas before finally settling on its final logo.

The price of the PlayStation in North America was revealed at Sony's keynote speech at the 1995 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Head of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, Steve Race, took to the podium after an intentionally long-winded speech to deliver a "brief presentation". His presentation consisted of one number: $299.

Marilyn Manson's 9th studio album, The Pale Emperor, was printed on PlayStation discs. Hassan Rahim and Willo Perron, the art directors of The Pale Emperor's disc and case, sourced the CDs from Sony directly. This means that the discs Rahim and Perron worked with, and the discs on which the album was distributed, came from the exact same plant as the PlayStation's discs did.

The CPU powering the NASA's New Horizons probe is the same CPU that once powered the original PlayStation console.

A Memory Card peripheral called PocketStation was released in 1999 which featured a monochrome LCD display, infrared communication capability, a real-time clock, built-in flash memory, and sound capability.

The PocketStation was originally going to have a western release, however it was cancelled due to problems meeting the Japanese demand for it.

It is possible in European Demo Discs to change the background of the menu. To do this, you must boot up a demo, wait a few seconds, then take out your current demo disc and replace it with a different one. Then you must wait a few more seconds and press "SELECT" to switch the background. This appears to not be intended as selecting a game not on the new disc will cause it to crash.

The iconic start-up sound of the PlayStation is actually a combination of three different clips stored in the system BIOS, which are then either sped up or slowed down to produce what is heard at the boot-up screen. These sounds also serve to check if the system is running normally and is OK to read games - errors within the system can lead to the startup sound becoming distorted.

On the system's Memory Card menu, after deleting data for a game, pressing the four shoulder buttons at the same time will cause the menu to reset and bring back the just-deleted save data. This feature was not carried over to the PlayStation 2.

Although the PlayStation has extraordinary copy protection, many hackers, home-brewers, and pirates worked around it via the infamous "Disc Swap" trick which is possible as the console uses a lid in a similar fashion to a portable CD player. This trick involves swapping a regular PlayStation disc with a back-up or rewritable CD during the startup.

Likely because of this exploit, Sony created future numbered PlayStation consoles that use disc trays rather than lids.

Reversing the startup sound for the console reveals the developers used a glass-breaking sound. This is most notable with the infamous “Personified Fear” glitch.

When the PlayStation 2 was revealed in Japan, a demo was shown off of a fountain of spark particles. When this demo was shown to Jon Burton, founder of Traveller's Tales, he coded an identical tech demo for the first PlayStation as a joke. This tech demo would ultimately end up in the files of Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!, unused, by accident.

Sony Interactive Entertainment America's president, during the early lifespan of the PlayStation, was staunchly opposed to two-dimensional games. PaRappa the Rapper, known for its paper-puppet-styled characters, only managed to release abroad thanks to its success domestically. When it proved to be a worldwide success, SIEA eased up on 2D games.

104 of the first games on the PlayStation came in vertically-shaped boxes. While all of them shared a template with the square boxes that would eventually win out as the standard, there was not a standard make or material for the boxes with them potentially coming as jewel cases like the square boxes, plastic cases with cardboard wrapping, and cardboard boxes with foam to keep games from slipping - some games had multiple of these box types made. Fade to Black was the final long box PlayStation release.

In 1992, after the failure of a deal to create a CD-ROM drive for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sony approached Sega of America proposing that they collaborate on a next-generation CD-ROM console to compete with Nintendo. While Sega of America was open to the idea and even started testing the waters between the two companies by having each develop a handful of titles for the Sega CD, Sega of Japan shot down the concept. Consequently, Sony would reorient their efforts towards what would become the PlayStation, while Sega would develop their own next-gen console, the Sega Saturn, in-house. In an interview with Sega-16, Tom Kalinske cited the veto as a factor in his decision to step down as head of Sega of America.