The PS2 is a universally beloved console and happens to hold one of the most storied histories of any console ever made. A lot of that history is common knowledge, with many people knowing that the PS2 was supported with games up until the release of PES 2014 in, well, 2013, or that the console has sold well over 160 million units to date. There are some facts and stories that aren’t quite as well known though, so we’re here to talk about 15 PS2 facts you might not have heard of. Maybe. No guarantees.
1. Halo On PS2 Nearly Happened
In a certain time period, it would have felt almost sacrilegious that Halo, the poster child for the Xbox console, could have been played on the PS2, but it almost came to pass. It’s almost common knowledge at this point that Halo started out life as a project built for Mac, before developers Bungie pivoted to console development, but before Halo: Combat Evolved debuted on the original Xbox, Bungie had been working on a prototype for a PS2 version. While nothing had been confirmed about a solid PS2 release for the original Halo, Bungie did have a deal with Take-Two to publish some of their games on console, including Oni, so it was assumed that the first Halo would have received some kind of multiplatform release too. They never got the game running on PS2, but it was something they were looking at doing, whether through a porting partner or something else.
Instead, Microsoft ended up buying Take-Two’s stake in Bungie, effectively gaining a controlling stake in the developer, making Halo exclusive as a result. Microsoft, Bungie and Take-Two all came together to iron out a deal, whereby Take-Two gained some properties and the rights to the Halo Engine for two games, while Microsoft gained the rights to Halo, making it the Xbox’s biggest exclusive in the process. PlayStation owners might have been robbed back then, but now, in 2024, Xbox are reportedly considering bringing the Halo series over to PlayStation, while Bungie is now a subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment. It might have taken 24 years, but talk about having your cake and eating it too.
2. Hey Dawg We Heard You Like PS2 and TV So We Put a PS2 In Your TV
PS2s are great and all, but you need a TV of some sort in order to be able to actually play the thing, so wouldn’t it be really convenient for someone to just shove a working PS2 inside a TV? Sony seemingly agreed with this sentiment, as they decided to release the Sony Bravia PX300 model of TV. While the PS2 isn’t inside the TV, it does form the TV’s base, meaning you’d need to clear a decent bit of room in order to get the TV to actually fit on your table, desk or whatever other device you’re using to rest your TV on.
The Sony Bravia KDL-22PX300, to give it its full title, is a 22 inch LCD TV that was able to output in up to 720p. The PS2 at the TV’s base is wired internally using a component video connection, so the Bravia PX300 TV is arguably one of the best ways to experience PS2 games using actual hardware and not emulation. However, the reason why the Bravia TV is considered both a rare find and a piece of lesser known PS2 trivia in general is the fact that the Bravia PX300 was only released in the UK, in December of 2010. You know, a few years after the PS3 had already been available. Clearly, Sony now needs to make some kind of TV with a PS3 built into it.
At the time, the Sony Bravia PX300 retailed for around £200, but due to the TV’s rarity, the TV now sells on eBay for anywhere from £600 to £2000.
3. It Boasted PSP Connectivity
Nintendo has always been known as the ruler of handheld consoles, specifically when it comes to connectivity between handhelds and the home console. Plenty of titles allowed some kind of connection between the Game Boy Advance and the GameCube, but the PS2 and PSP also offered connectivity of its own. A decent amount of the games that were able to connect from PS2 to PSP, and vice versa, mainly allowed players to transfer their saves from one console to another, with WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2006, FIFA 08 and Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast being some of the most notable examples. Being able to continue your career on the daily commute before picking it up back home was incredibly forward thinking of Sony.
There were a few games that also offered some interesting connectivity benefits though. Crash Tag Team Racing and Micro Machines V4 would unlock version specific tracks and vehicles on both the PS2 and PSP, while Jak X (Combat Racing) would connect with Daxter to unlock a new vehicle in Daxter. We promise they’re not all about racing games. Perhaps the most ambitious use of this feature though is SOCOM’s Crosstalk, which would give players unlocks and, crucially, change the gameplay of missions depending on the player’s performance in the paired game. For example, rescuing a group of resistance fighters in one mission in SOCOM 3 will let you infiltrate an objective in SOCOM Fireteam Bravo a lot easier. It was bold and brilliant in equal measure.
4. Offered Cross-Play With Other Platforms
Cross-play has almost become a commodity we’ve taken for granted in gaming, as the ability for console gamers (and PC gamers, depending on the game in question) to play together regardless of their platform is a good thing. It keeps games populated, shortens queue times and allows friends to stay together. It’s a wonderful feature, and while it took until the middle years of the PS4 and Xbox One era for cross-play to become an adopted feature across the majority of the gaming industry (thanks largely to Fortnite, if you want to give it the credit), the PS2 beat them all to it with Final Fantasy XI. When the MMORPG was released in 2002, the game offered cross-play with PC players, a first for the genre. Later, FFXI would even offer cross-play with the Xbox 360 release, as Microsoft tried to grow its install base in Japan. We all know how that went.
While Final Fantasy XI might be the more prominent example, it’s far from the only one. Need For Speed Underground allowed for online play between PS2 and PC along with Phantasy Star Universe, but the first example ever of cross-play between two competing console platforms goes to Capcom Vs SNK 2: Mark Of The Millennium 2001. While the online portion of CvS2 was only available within Japan, it did allow players to compete against others online via their PS2 or SEGA Dreamcast, earning the distinction of being the first cross-play game ever. We can never discount the PS2’s contributions to both online play and crossplay in particular.
5. The Reason Behind Different Disc Colors
It’s an established fact at this point that some PS2 discs just happened to be blue, but the reason why isn’t quite as well known. We’ll admit that it’s probably the most well-known of all the facts on this list, but we’re willing to bet that some people still think that the discs were blue just because it looked cool. That’s certainly part of the reason, as blue discs are awesome and more discs these days should feature bold and weird colors, but the reasoning came down to the difference between CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. Essentially, if your disc was blue (or black in the case of PS1 discs), you were playing a CD-ROM disc, while the silver/gold finish indicated a DVD-ROM.
The functional difference between the two is that the CD-ROM could only hold about 700mb of data, while the DVD-ROM held up to nearly 5GB. If developers were making a game that was smaller in size or scope, it’d be much cheaper for them to distribute physical copies using CDs instead of DVDs, hence why some PS2 discs were blue. More often than not too, these discs would also end up being the first games in your collection to become useless, as the CD-ROM part of the PS2’s laser disc drive would often be the first to fail.
6. Your Saves Used to Cry
Does anyone else miss when video games were just a tad more whimsical? We certainly do. We long for the days of memory cards filled with your various save games, each with their own unique icons, and the PS2 was filled with them. Game specific icons for your saves isn’t an unknown PS2 fact by any means, but it’s the extra details that certain developers went to that makes this fact pretty special. Some devs were just content on sticking key art on the side of a cube, or simply making a 3D version of the game’s logo and calling it a day, but there were some icons that were truly special.
Games like God Hand, Ridge Racer, Mr Mosquito and countless others would have a character model or mascot related to the game performing some cute animation, and they’d even have their own reactions if you wanted to copy or delete the save file. Tekken Tag Tournament might have one of the more brutal animations, with Xiaoyu breaking down crying on the floor if you happen to select the delete save option. Come on, man. You don’t want to make her cry now, do you? That’s it, delete your PES 5 Master League save instead. Maybe if PES 5 had John Terry and Thierry Henry having a breakdown, we’d delete something else.
7. People Still Play The PS2 Online Today
We mentioned earlier how the PS2 had been at the forefront of online gaming in a lot of ways, and its contributions are often overlooked compared to both the Dreamcast before it and the Xbox after it. Xbox Live and Halo 2 did kind of slap, to be fair, but those on Sony’s console had plenty of online gaming to sink their teeth into. They had so much, in fact, that even though all the online services for these games have been nuked into oblivion long ago, talented teams of modders and emulators have worked behind the scenes to ensure that a vast majority of PS2 games are still playable online.
While you might struggle today to find people looking to play Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball MAX’D online, PS2Online is a community that offers online access to a variety of PS2 games. On top of that, various communities have sprung up around specific games, with SOCOM Community and Outbreak Server Resurrection leading the charge on people who want to play SOCOM and Resident Evil Outbreak online today. They’re niche communities, to be frank, so don’t go there expecting Fortnite numbers, but you can find plenty of dedication and enthusiasm for some of the PS2’s online classics. Meanwhile, we’ll keep pitching for Sony and Capcom to make a new SOCOM or Outbreak, please and thank you.
8. Someone Changed Their Name To Mr PS2
A silly one this, but worth bringing up nonetheless; the 2000s to early 2010s were seemingly full of people who’d either change their names or promise to name their kids after famous video games or consoles, usually with the view of earning a bit of notoriety or free swag from the developers and publishers. Remember all those sprogs called Turok for a bit there? The couple who named their kid Dovahkiin after the player character in Skyrim also spring to mind, with Megan and Eric Kellermeyer receiving free Bethesda games for life in the process. How’s that copy of Starfield working out, folks? While the Dovahkiin moment happened in 2011, an English guy by the name of Dan Holmes had them beat by nearly a decade when he changed his name to Mr PlayStation 2.
According to reports from the time, Dan changed his name via deed poll, a process which is easier and cheaper to do than changing the details on your RyanAir tickets. Donning the name Mr PlayStation 2, Dan did the media rounds, talking about how he was made fun of for his gaming habits, and that he even wanted to marry his PS2, but couldn’t find a vicar who was willing. In truth, Dan Holmes probably wanted to get 15 minutes of fame for something silly, and figured becoming Mr PS2 was worth a shot. British media was filled with chancers like that in the 2000s, though it certainly paid off for some. Where Dan Holmes ended up after the Mr PS2 incident is unclear, though PlayStation Lifestyle speculate that Dan changed his name back to Mr Dan, sorry, probably just Dan, pretty soon afterwards and returned to his normal, non-console named life.
9. It (Kind Of) Supported HD
One of the big benefits of moving from the PS2 to the PS3 was the fact that the PS3 offered true native support for high definition gaming. Home TV displays were moving from CRTs to flatscreen plasma TVs, LCD monitors and beyond, which were capable of much better quality visuals, and gaming needed to move with those times too. However, a little known fact about the PS2 is that it did support high definition gaming.
You know, kind of. Barely.
While a lot of games often supported 16:9 widescreen displays, and would run at a maximum of 480p in resolution, a select three games in total were able to run in 1080i, which just about meets the requirements of high definition gaming. Ish. Kind of. You see, the PS2 wasn’t actually running at 1080i natively, but instead was rendering games at around 640×540 then upscaling the image to fill the interlaced 1920×540 frames of the 1080i. It’s not really true HD, in all honesty, but it was a sign of the improving technology available to both players and developers that some developers tried to experiment with an early version of HD on the PS2. As for the games that were available in this visual mode, you have Gran Turismo 4, Tourist Trophy and Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmerium as confirmed supporters of 1080i, while some have also said that NHL 2004 and Jackass: The Game (of all things) are also 1080i capable. However, the feature was only available for PS2s in the US and Japan.
10. The Brazilian Netflix
The idea that you could watch Netflix via your PS2 sounds absolutely ludicrous, but if you happened to be living in Brazil between 2009 and 2012, it was your reality, but first we’re going to have to give quite a bit of background. Due to issues regarding both piracy and Brazil’s astronomically high import tax rate, the PS2 only officially went on sale in 2009 in Brazil. Before then, retailers would purchase PS2 units from Paraguay and sell them for a fraction of what Sony would. Meanwhile, any PS2 that was around in Brazil would often be jailbroken, which meant piracy would stop legitimate game sales in their tracks. Anyway, Sony dodged the tax problem by manufacturing PS3s in Brazil, and PS2s starting selling in Brazil not long afterwards.
Meanwhile, Microsoft managed to strike a deal with Netflix to reserve the rights for instantaneous film streaming on console, which Sony and Nintendo managed to circumvent by offering Netflix on disc. This disc-based version would have the same benefits as the app and give players access to the full service, but you just needed that disc to use it. With Sony manufacturing the PS3 and its Netflix discs anyway, and the PS2 just going on sale in Brazil, the decision was made to include PS2 in this Netflix deal, resulting in Brazilian-only PS2 Netflix discs. It’s kind of wild to think about, but in a way, the PS2 was the prototype for consoles becoming the all-in-one media centers that the PS5 and Xbox Series X & S have become.
12. The Design Was Inspired By Atari
The original PS2’s design is iconic, even if you could cut yourself on its various points and angles, but original isn’t a good word for it. Instead, it should be known that the design for the first model of PS2, the big black one, was inspired by an old, unreleased prototype of an Atari console. The Atari Falcon 030 utilised a wedge design when it was originally released, but Atari began prototyping a microbox case for the next model, the 040. This microbox version would be able to stand either horizontally or vertically, and contained enough angles and edges to make a cubist artist blush.
As you can no doubt guess, this unused prototype design ultimately formed the basis of the PS2’s core design, and when you stick both consoles together side by side, the resemblance is simply uncanny. Sony even mentioned the Atari Falcon’s prototype design in the patent for the PS2, so it’s clear that the Falcon was an inspiration for the design of the PlayStation 2. However, Sony also had the incredible idea to make the console black with a blue trim, instead of this boring gray obelisk, so you can’t say that Sony didn’t add their own touch to the design. Maybe Sony improving on the design was their little taunt for Atari trying to block the release of the PS1, but who knows? Roll the $299 clip.
Bonus fact: the black represented space, and the blue represented Earth. Moving on.
12. It Could Be Turned Into A Linux Machine
One of the coolest aspects of the PS1 was Net Yaroze, the tool that allowed players to make and share their own games from the comfort of their own home, and Sony did allow players to do the same again with the PS2. Released in 2002, the Linux Kit for PS2 was released by Sony Computer Entertainment and included all the tools you’d need to turn your PS2 into a computer, ready to make your own games. While getting hold of a legit copy of this rare find can be pretty difficult now, 20 years after the fact, there are still plenty of tutorials and guides out there on the internet for anyone who wants to enter the crazy world of PS2 Linux gaming.
We won’t spend too much more time on this fact, as Sony kind of kept the Linux capabilities quiet, and support for the PS2 version of Linux online ended in 2009. A year later, the PS3 version, OtherOS, would also be nuked, terminating the PlayStation and Linux partnership for good. Despite the end of this partnership, thinking about consoles as computers did lead to some interesting results, which is a neat segue into this next fact.
13. It Nearly Sparked An International Incident
I don’t even know where we should start with this one, other than to say that the PS2 almost became the centerpiece of an international incident somehow. Let’s break it down. In early 2000, just after the release of the PS2 within the region, Japan instituted heavy export controls on the PS2, as the Japanese government argued that components of the PS2 could be used for military purposes, particularly missile guidance systems, as components of the console were able to process multiple high quality images quickly. Essentially, Japan was worried that if someone strapped a bunch of PS2s together, someone would be able to control missiles like Solid Snake wielding a Nikita in Metal Gear Solid 2. Sony were faced with the choice of either facing heavy penalties from the government, or applying for special exemption. They chose the latter, and the Japanese government gave permission for Sony to export to all countries except Libya, North Korea, Iran and, crucially, Iraq. We’ll circle back to that last one.
What’s interesting about this story/fact in hindsight is that the Japanese government had every right to be concerned, as research conducted in the years since proved the viability of consoles as makeshift supercomputers. You just need to strap a bunch of them together, apparently. The National Center For Supercomputing Applications created a PS2 supercomputer back in 2003, while the US army even managed to create one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers by strapping nearly 1,800 PS3s together. All this talk of console supercomputing did lead to a “report” from right-wing website World News Daily that the then-leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein had purchased around 4000 PS2 consoles, with the view of combining the computing power of all of them in order to advance their military technology on the cheap. The story was considered ridiculous, even at the time, though the tale has stuck around over the years like other gaming urban legends. You’ve got Polybius, Minecraft’s Herobrine and Saddam’s big ol’ PS2 computer.
14. It Did Sneak King Before Sneak King
We’re vultures of cultures here, and what that means is that we love weird crap, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that we unironically love Sneak King, Burger King’s stealth game based on the iconic mascot. You know, the one with the terrifying head that’d haunt your dreams? Yeah, that guy. Back in 2006, BK released three themed Xbox/Xbox 360 games that were sold pretty cheaply in North American stores, those being PocketBike Racer, Big Bumpin’ and Sneak King. So far, so well known, but the King was beaten to the punch by the PS2 and McDonalds, kind of.
While McDonalds didn’t exactly release their own game, complete with mascot Ronald McDonald running around and scaring the crap out of people (which he would; that clown is straight up nightmarish), McDonalds Japan did enter a partnership with Sony to release the McDonalds Happy Disc. Sold only at McDonalds, this Happy Disc contained demo versions of PaRappa the Rapper 2 and Ape Escape 2001, the Japan-only remake of the first Ape Escape, but these demos were altered to feature McDonalds branding all over the place. There’s monkeys eating burgers, a McDonalds blimp and PaRappa is even flipping burgers inside of McDonalds in a remade version of that game’s first level.
15. An Official SEGA Saturn Controller?!
There’s been a lot of weird controllers on the PS2. We’re not just talking about the peripherals either, like the Guitar Hero controllers, or the motion control straps that let you play golf badly. No, just some honest to goodness oddball controllers, with the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw controller serving as the most obvious example. There’s also the Dragon Quest Slime controller, which is about as cute as it is uncomfortable to use, the Final Fantasy X-2 gun controllers and the Onimusha 3 Katana controller. Oh, and let’s not forget the Rez Trance Pad thing. It vibrated as you sat on it.
Moving on.
Perhaps the oddest controller of them all was this monstrosity released by SEGA: the Fukkokuban SEGA Saturn Control Pad For PlayStation 2. As the name suggests, it’s a functioning SEGA Saturn controller repurposed for use on the PlayStation 2. They’ve added a “select” button, but that’s about it, with the same six face buttons and two shoulder buttons having to be translated to work on the PS2. There aren’t any analog control sticks either, so a lot of PS2 games would be incompatible to play too. Even though the SEGA Saturn controller for the PS2 is deeply unsuited for playing on the console, it’s interesting to look at the timeline of Sony and SEGA’s relationship during the PS2 generation. The PS2 released competing with SEGA’s Dreamcast, but by 2006, just before the release of the PS3, the two companies would collaborate to unleash this unholy abomination on the world.
Still, give me the chainsaw controller instead, honestly. And the Rez pad. We need it, for reasons.
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