Video: 'The future of the PlayStation' from Phil Harrison, in 2000

The PlayStation 2 ultimately became the best-selling video game console in history, shifting over 150 million units.

The PlayStation 2 ultimately became the best-selling video game console in history, shifting over 150 million units. These were Sony's salad days. And they had a beginning, of course.

In this 2000 keynote, delivered a week after the console launched in Japan and ahead of its release in the West, former Sony exec Phil Harrison delivers a characteristically charismatic look at Sony's then-new hardware, as the company was poised to strike.

The speech was geared towards "the creative and technical people in the audience," meant to inspire them to "challenge your development metholodogy and really think of new ways to bring great content to market in the future," Harrison said at the time.

It's a fascinating look back at Sony's aspirations for its second big bet in games, and the one that brought it the most success -- a snapshot of a time that's so easy to forget, as we live in a much-changed era and amidst the success of the PlayStation 4, a different kind of success that lives alongside smartphones and resurgent PC games.

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