Net Yaroze

Above is not a picture of a PS1 like you might think.  Well, it sort of is, but not really.

What you are looking at up there is something called the Net Yaroze (as in Japanese やろぜ, as in "lets do it") which was basically a mail order development kit where fans could make their own games for the playstation.

I never had one of these, but according to wikipedia these things at the time would set you back $750 and on top of that you had to provide your own PC to actually code the games on.  Still, you bet your ass that coding hobbyists at the time got a kick out of this bit of kit.

So how did one get their games out?  Well back in the day, before you could hook a system up to the internet, demos used to come taped to the front of magazines.  The Official Playstation Magazine would have a demo disc every month, and bundled in with the demos was a couple of Net Yaroze games.  I would get excited for these demo discs because even though the games were kind of ass, these were full games and the prospect of getting video games to play at that age would make my head spin with excitement.

The games were actually sort of ass but they did have a sort of charm about them that made them fun to play.  The first Yaroze which I remember playing was something called Pushy2b

A little puzzle game where you had to push blocks on to X's to clear the level.  The sound effects were sort of annoying but it was pretty fun, and it was nice to get a free game inside a demo.

So what  I've decided is that when I get some time I'll record some footage of these games and put them up on youtube so you can get a feel of what I experienced in my younger days, so keep an eye out for that!