Sony officially ends Playstation 3 production in Japan

It truly is the end of an era when a company decides to pull the plug on one of their most popular video game systems, and that is what Sony just did as they are ending production of the Playstation 3 – specifically the 500 GB “Super Slim” model that has become the last version to be made and sold.

Much like its predecessors in the Playstation 1 and 2, the PS3 has sold millions of units worldwide and has had a rich and stellar library of games. However, it did suffer from a slow and rocky start in the first few years since it was launched for mass consumption.

Announced by Sony in the 2005 edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the system was officially launched on November the following year with a sleek black chrome design, with a logo design using the same font that was seen in the Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” films. As the first system to use HDMI output and read Blu-Ray discs, the first “fat” PS3 was also backwards compatible with Playstation 1 and 2 games.

Unfortunately for the launch model, it suffered from some setbacks – including a “Yellow Light of Death” that rendered the console unplayable. Subsequent revisions helped to fix the problem, but it took a while for Sony to get its bearings back and face up to its direct competitor Microsoft with their Xbox 360.

After a few years of struggle, Sony eventually regained its footing by releasing a “Slim” model of the Playstation 3 in 2009  - complete with a brand new logo and adding more hard disk storage space options to the system.
Slimmer and a lot more compact than its predecessor, the only setback to the redesign was the removal of Playstation 2 disc emulation  - meaning PS2 Games could no longer be played in the system unless the owner has a Playstation Network account and downloaded the titles again. This was a hard transition for most users, but eventual revisions in the Playstation Store and the convenience of owning digital media supplanted those concerns over time. 

Three years later, in 2012, another model was released in the “Super Slim”, which reduced the size of the PS3 yet again and did away with slot loading favor of a manual sliding disc cover.

With the Playstation 4 now seated as Sony’s current generation juggernaut system, the Playstation 3 has earned a valuable reputation in its 11 year life span, bringing memorable games such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand Theft Auto IV and V, Uncharted 1, 2, and 3, Street Fighter IV, Little Big Planet, and Final Fantasy XIII to gamers worldwide, It certainly helped set the stage for digital gaming services as we know it today, and is another footnote in video game history that deserves to be honored and remembered. — TJD, GMA News