

Console LaunchReleased at the turn of the century, the PlayStation 2 was launched as the direct successor to the PlayStation, to help further expand Sony's increasing dominance over the gaming industry.The Playstation 2 met with an initially troubled launch. Though first week sales in Japan for the machine toppled the 900,000 mark, the console was hit with world-wide stock shortages for the first few months, due to excessive demand, coupled with Sony's inability to manufacture new machines quicker than they were being sold. It wasn't until early 2001 that the console became readily available directly from store shelves. CommendationThe PlayStation 2 was the first video games console to be released with built in DVD support. Many critics consider this to be one of the biggest driving factors for the high sales of the machine, and also one of the reasons for the increase in popularity of DVDs as the standard media format.It was also the first console in well over a decade to have fully integrated backward compatibility with the console that proceeded it; in this case, the PSone. CriticismsThe PlayStation 2 is widely accepted amongst developers as being a notoriously difficult machine to develop for, due to a general lack of reference material and proper dev kits since the machine's launch, although this issue is one that has been substantially fixed since.Misc. InformationTo date, the PlayStation 2 is the fastest selling console in history, selling more than 100 million units in just over 6 years, and is also the fastest selling console at launch.
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Entertainment
clocked at 294 MHz
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