The system was so heavily marketed as a "cool" lifestyle accessory - with Sony encouraging people to take it to nightclubs with them, and raise glasses of Southern Comfort and Coke ("So-Co") in its honour, and likening it to a tattooed frenum - that it is largely forgotten that it also played host to a number of properly decent platformers.
History is in the process of being rewritten, however, with the recent remaster of the Crash Bandicoot games, and the upcoming reimagining of the system's premiere platform hero, Spyro. But if we dive deeper into the PS1's platform game pool, what other treats might we find feeding on its bottom?
Here are ten such games which deserve a re-evaluation.
Reviews at the time we mixed, with most critics and punters viewing the 2D side-scroller as a genre that was long past its prime. Every single one of those people is now exposed as a "consumate dunce".
You see, while Lomax might not have been the most original game ever, it leveraged the meaty muscles of the PlayStation to offer an experience that was far, far more lush than anything we got in the previous generation.
Everybody remembers the limbless wonder that is Rayman, but Lomax was every bit as pretty.
It sold well, but its cutesy visuals meant that it stood out as an aberration on a system more commonly associated with grim and gritty "grown-up" adventures, or games with soundtracks by cool dude clubbermen like The Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Lou Bega, Len, and The New Radicals.
In short: cool kids thought it was a stupid game for stupid babies.
Ha ha. Joke's on you now: you got old, and one day you're gonna die!
Indeed, despite the human protagonists, it often played more like a Sonic The Hedgehog game than anything else - some levels almost being structured like oversized pinball tables or rollercoasters, and into-the-screen tunnel bits.
The main thing it lacked was the unspecified "attitude" displayed by Sega's spiny mascot. Though now I think about it, when they say Sonic is "The Hedgehog with Attitude", perhaps they're referring to Attitude, the UK's leading gay lifestyle magazine.
The slower pace, the flip-screens, the shadow-y enemies - even the colour palette - were all deeply reminiscent of the ground-breaking cinematic platformer. Chahi has since admitted that he found the development challenging, having had to adjust from being a solo developer to supervising a team.
It's a shame that he doesn't make more games, because I'd always loved him when the Fonz's younger cousin Happy Days.
Nevertheless, while Heart of Darkness is frequently frustrating - as were Another World and Flashback - it's a ruddy gorgeous game. Apart from the cut-scenes, which are typically horribly, in a primordial soup of CGI sort of a way.
That said, the benefit of hindsight suggests it actually played more like Super Mario 3D World than the epoch-defining 64, but it managed to have a few neat twists of its own - such as sort-of-on-rails bits where Pac-Man would just take off on a pill-chomping frenzy. We've all had a few weekends like that right, cool kids?
To modern eyes Pac Man World may not appear to be particularly revolutionary, but it ws a solid stab at making Pac-Man relevant again, demonstrating that the character had enough original ideas to ensure he wasn't just smearing his wrinkled, jaundiced, jowls across the success of more recent successes.
We've had the sublime Cuphead paying homage to the hand-drawn animation of the past... now how about a game that appears to be stop-motion? I dunno. Maybe that's a rubbish idea. Who cares?
Ding ding! Check, please!
Oddly, it succeeded straight out of the gate, so it's a surprise that first-person perspective platforming is an idea that has rarely been built upon. While it might have aged visually, Jumping Flash still stands up today, almost.
Mirror's Edge has done first-person platforming in a very different way - and there are elements of it in Titanfall 2 and the recent Doom reboot - but none have succeeded in inducing the same sort of stomach-contorting vertigo.
...There are a lot of these aren't there? This list is feeling a bit long. Maybe I should've done just five? Oh well. Committed now.
How many more of these are there? I'm getting bored now. There are only so many ways to say "This is an old platform game that I'd like to see a new version of".
Aside form anything else, it did something original with the genre - making it about capturing living apes rather than the usual coin-grabbling. Also: it boasted a handful of mini games. And it was funny.
We're almost at the end now. You can stop here if you want, but there is an interesting fact coming up. It's a fact about Nintendo. You like those don't you?
Here's that interesting fact I advised you of: Croc originally started life as a prototype for a game starring Yoshi - developer Argonaut had a relationship with Nintendo through its development of the Super FX chip. Given this, it's little surprise that it played in a similar fashion to Mario 64, but its origins make it significant enough to encourage a revamp.
Or not. It doesn't really matter to be honest. Do what you like.
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