A Bedroom Cinema Built on DVDs

Our house already had a DVD player by the time the PlayStation 2 arrived, a silver Panasonic thing that lived under the telly in the living room and really only ever played whatever my parents had rented from Xtravision* on a Friday.

My PS2 didn't replace it, but it did become the DVD player upstairs. The one in my bedroom, the one I controlled, the one that introduced me to art on my own terms. And suddenly, friends weren’t just bringing games over but movies too.

Contact, Blade Runner, Zoolander, Oldboy, City of God…

The first DVD I bought with my hard earned cash was Taxi, the Luc Besson one with the souped-up Peugeot tearing through Marseille. I picked it up cheap from somewhere I can’t quite remember now, possibly an HMV sale, possibly a Virgin Megastore, the details have gone but the disc hasn’t.

I watched it more times than the film really deserved.

Partly because owning a DVD still felt slightly miraculous in 2001, and the jump in picture quality from VHS was the biggest leap in fidelity I can remember, much sharper than DVD to Blu-Ray ever felt later. But mostly because I'd discovered the director's commentary track.

If you’re too young to remember, DVDs often came with a version of the film where the director talked over the top of it, breaking down shots, pointing out mistakes, and drifting off into stories about catering, lighting setups, and whatever else came to mind.

Some DVD commentaries are legendary. The Thing, This Is Spinal Tap, and Conan the Barbarian all stand out, mostly because of Arnold Schwarzenegger dryly narrating exactly what’s already happening on screen.

“Heh, yeah, and here I am crushing his skull with the sword… errraguh, heh.”

They were all a bit magical.

Late at night, headphones in, lying in bed with the PlayStation 2 humming away under the TV, those commentaries became a kind of company. Somebody's voice walking you through their own film while you half-listened, half-drifted, the disc tray glowing blue in the dark.

This is the bit Sony likes telling, the part where the the console became a media object as much as a games machine, and it’s mostly true with a slight caveat.

The PlayStation 2 launched in Japan in March 2000 at ¥39,800, in North America that October at $299, in the UK in November at £299. Standalone DVD players in the US that year cost somewhere between $200 and $400, with the genuinely good ones higher still.

So in reality, the PlayStation 2 wasn’t always the cheapest player in the room, but it was very often the cheapest one that also played Tekken Tag Tournament, and that combination helped immensely.

But the caveat is that DVD adoption was already moving fast.

US shipments went from 1.1 million units in 1998 to 4.1 million in 1999, the year before Sony’s newest console existed anywhere. By the time they launched in America, shipments had more than doubled again. I guess what I’m saying is: Sony didn’t start the wave with the PlayStation 2, but they rode it, and the riding was masterful.

What is worth considering is how this all doubled the console’s cultural reach. It was in living rooms, plugged into the same telly that played the rented copy of The Matrix and the Christmas box set of Only Fools and Horses.

But it was also in bedrooms like mine, where it became the first piece of cinema tech I’d ever owned, the machine that let me watch Taxi at one in the morning with Gérard Pirès telling me how he shot the car chases.

By 2006 DVD had reached 81% of US households. The PlayStation 2 sold 150 million units across its lifetime, and a good chunk of those buyers came in through a side door.

Mostly, I think that side door is the bit worth remembering. The DVD tray beside the memory card slots and controller ports. Both belonged to the same machine.

Once everyone else had gone to bed, you could keep playing Final Fantasy X, sure, but the room also became your own little late-night cinema, rented DVDs spinning in the dark glow of the bedroom TV.

Arnold’s guttural tenacity lulling you off, one decapitation at a time...

*Xtravision was an Ireland-specific video rental chain, similar to Blockbuster.