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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.