Like it or not, the PlayStation 2 turned 21 this week, reminding us all that time is a relentless bastard and we're all born to die. On the bright side, we got an excuse to look back at what makes the PS2 so special! Aside from being the most popular home console of all time, it had a huge library of incredible games, many of which are as excellent to play today as they were back then.
A quick stroll through Twitter reminds us how relevant the PS2 is after all these years, and how much it still means to so many.
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But not every remembrance was a happy one. A handful of users recalled the console's most stressful feature, if you can call it a feature. I'm referring, of course, to the red screen of death. For those that never owned a PlayStation 2, the red screen of death was the dreaded error message that would come up whenever the console couldn't read the disc you'd just put in.
More often than not, this error would only appear if you'd tried to play an unsupported format like an Xbox 360 or PC disc... but every now and again, players would be taken to the red screen of death even when trying to load up a perfectly normal PS2 disc. This typically meant your disc was completely screwed beyond the point of the console being able to recognise it as a PS2 game anymore, hence the negative connotations the red screen has cultivated over the years.
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For young gamers who didn't really know what the red screen meant beyond a serious error, it was an absolutely terrifying thing to see. I remember genuinely believing I'd broken our PlayStation 2 for a whole week when I first saw the red screen. It wasn't until my dad asked why I hadn't played it in so long that I realised my younger sister had put an Xbox disc in the drive.
Yeah, I will always love my PlayStation 2... but I sure as hell don't miss that damn red screen of death.
Topics: GAMING, News, PlayStation
