Hands up, who here remembers their first Playstation Platinum game? If you’ve lived outside the PAL Playstation regions (Europe, Australia, Middle East, Australia), chances are you don’t even know what I’m talking about. The ‘Platinum’ label was awarded to PS1 games that had been out for over a year and sold over 400,000 copies in the PAL region. Qualifying games would then be re-housed with cool shiny, silvery labels and – crucially – marked down to £20 here in the UK. These games were also sometimes patched, with bug fixes and improved loading times from their original versions.
They looked really classy, unlike the equivalent in the US – ‘Greatest Hits’ – which had a goo green label with ‘Greatest Hits’ written in red on it.
I remember my first batch of Platinum games well, because without them I probably wouldn’t have become a PS1 owner. It was in 1999 on a smashing winter evening, and it was a big day in my gaming life, when I braved the rain to go to my local electronics boutique to make a trade-in that was breaking friendships at the time.
I traded in my N64 and I would buy a PS1. Controversial, I know, but Nintendo’s curvaceous console had grown old for me, and I was constantly jealous of the sheer selection of games on the Sony side. Every time I went to the store, it felt like the PlayStation games section was increasingly gobbling up the N64s, like a completely hypothetical post-Soviet power nation would eat up its neighbors’ territory. Even though the N64 was supposed to enjoy something of an Indian Summer in the early 2000s with games like Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, it couldn’t compete with the galaxy of immersive PS1 games out there (vs. At the end of its life, the PS1 had over 3000 games, while the N64 had just 400).
So I gave my N64 in its plastic body bag over the counter at EB, hoping that the collection of games in their muted, disintegrating cardboard packaging would be valuable enough to start my life as a PS1 player with some appearance of a collection.
The staff behind the desk at EB inspected my old N64 and suspiciously pressed the buttons on the controller (without noticing the slightly squidgy ‘L’ shoulder button). They plucked each of the once-loved old games from the plastic bag between the tips of their index fingers and thumb, the way a parent would pick up used tissues in a teenage boy’s bedroom.
Banjo-Kazooie really deserved a better fate than this…
Finally I got an offer. I can’t remember the exact number now, but it wasn’t great, it made about one full-fledged PS1 game for every three N64 games. After scouring the shelves of the latest PS1 games for a while, I started to wonder if my controversial console switch was such a good idea at such a bad exchange rate. It’s at this point that something silver gleamed in the corner of my view, like a twinkling interactive item in an old adventure game.
I looked around, and there it was: the Playstation Platinum collection – several rows of shelves filled with shiny silver-colored games. As I recall, the platinum part was only about the same size as the entire N64 part, and with its silver labels and clear PS1 jewelry boxes, it was way more eye-catching. Remember, this was also late 1999, and relatively late in the PS1’s lifecycle, which meant that many of the best games ever released for consoles had been out long enough to qualify as platinum games. In addition, EB had an offer of two Platinum games for £30. The last N64 game I bought for under that price was a horrible second-hand fighting game called Rakuga Kids – in hindsight, that was probably the last straw…
And Man, what a nice batch were the Platinum games: Metal Gear Solid, Tekken 3, one of the Crash Bandicoots, Resident Evil 2, Tenchu. I didn’t realize at this point that I didn’t care much for Final Fantasy VII, but hey, it’s a classic and it was over there for a bargain. The Platinum collection was phenomenal and in some ways illustrated the PS1’s biggest advantages over the N64: choice and price.
Platinum collections existed all the way through the PS2 and PS3 era, but it didn’t have the same heaviness. Maybe it has to do with the fact that PS1 jewel cases really made those platinum games to shine, while the soft plastic covers that protect PS2 and PS3 games are said to abrade and dull much more quickly. On the PS3, Platinum games would also look pretty ugly, with the label looking a lot more gray than silver, with this weird yellow liner making it look like there was tape around the box.
The “Platinum” branding was rebranded as “Essentials” in 2010, making those red-and-white labeled games just seem a little cheap. I associated ‘Essentials’ with scratchy toilet paper and tacky house brand Baked Beans in the supermarket, while ‘Platinum’ really made me feel like these games should to deserve that condition. Seeing the flaw in their ways, Sony switched things from ‘Essentials’ to ‘PlayStation Hits’ for their PS4 games in 2018, but it couldn’t match the sheer class and gravitas of that PS1 Platinum collection.
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