With all the hub bub surrounding the 10 year celebration of Xbox, many geeks and gamers might have forgotten about the PlayStation 3‘s Fifth birthday. On November 17th 2006, the ebony shined PS3 came crashing down onto North American retail shelves. It was a slightly different affair back then as even the most hardcore of PS fanboys were thrown into a fit over the two different models to choose from, neither of which were very cheap. The faithful did indeed line the sidewalks for days prior to the launch though, investing a considerable amount of money into Sony’s wonder machine. As with all console launches there were problems, robbings, lack of units to fill pre-orders, etc. but the machine still enthralled all who gazed at it.

The last five years have given us Infamous, Uncharted, Resistance, Little Big Planet, a host of updated sequels and some jaw dropping PS2 remakes. We fell in love with the blu ray format and learned to love each other (sometimes quite literally) in PlayStation Home and we even helped crack the mysteries of the human body with Folding@Home. We even saw the return of the DualShock controller. It hasn’t been all roses and chocolates though. We had the Leap Year bug, causing gamers to lose trophies and saves while Sony stayed mum. We lost backwards compatibility with each new version of the deck. Linux was taken away as hackers found nefarious ways to use the Dual-OS option. We lost the PlayStation Network for an agonizing month after hackers tore down the network and we lost faith in Sony as they stayed way too quiet way too long.

The network did come back, along with a slew of freebies and more than just a little egg on Sony’s face. Now the electronics giant is poised to reclaim it’s long held crown of consoles as it works hard to tell us, the fans, we’re appreciated. They glorify us in the “Long, Live, Play” campaign and remade the PlayStation Home service to say “Hey, let’s have fun”. They even just made DC Universe free to play on the system as well as on PCs. And can we forget those pesky PS4 rumors? It may have been five roller coaster years but what an exciting time it’s been! Here’s to five more years my faithful piano-black giant monolith!

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