Category: Daily Caller
25 years later, the gaming console that caused so much chaos is still No. 1
After a quarter of a century, one console still reigns supreme.
It has been nearly 25 years to the day since iconic photos and video of the Paris launch showed just how crazy the world was for PlayStation 2.
‘I never leave my house.’
On November 24, 2000, crowds in Europe lined up, camped, and even pushed through crowds to get their hands on a PlayStation 2 for the first time. The launch was almost a month after the American Oct. 26 debut and signified a true consumerism-fueled riot that became synonymous with Black Friday.
From its launch day through Christmas 2000, Sony said it sold 1.35 million units in North America and another 1 million units in Europe during that same period.
The PS2 has sold an average of over 6 million consoles per year since then, or 500,000 per month, totaling more than 160 million lifetime units sold as of this November.
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As reported by Techgaged.com, the PS2 eclipses two Nintendo products at the top of the list.
The second-most sales are for the handheld Nintendo DS at 154 million, followed by the Nintendo Switch portable console at 152 million.
A steep drop occurs for fourth place with the original Game Boy, released in 1989, having 118 million units sold. Sony’s PS1 and Nintendo’s Wii are the only other gaming systems to have sold over 100 million.
Interestingly, the PlayStation 2’s main competitors during its era, the Nintendo GameCube (launched in North America on Nov. 18, 2001) and the original Xbox (launched in North America on Nov. 15, 2001), do not even crack the top-20 list.
The Xbox, Microsoft’s first foray into gaming systems, has sold 24.65 million units in its lifetime, while the GameCube has sold 21.74 million units.
Both company’s modern systems — Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch — have already surpassed the sales of their 2000s counterparts.
Photo By Eduardo Parra/Europa Press via Getty Images
The PS2 was so pervasive, historical image banks provide a bounty of time capsules showing celebrities flooding PS2-themed parties that were constantly taking place to promote the product.
There were events like the PlayStation 2 and the Hip-Hop Summit “Race to the Polls” event in 2004, or the mouthful, PlayStation 2 Celebrates Red White and Blue with Poolside Party at the Bentley Hotel in NYC, temporarily referred to as the PlayStation 2 Hotel for the occasion, in 2003.
Super Bowl parties became linked with the console during that era too. The Sony PlayStation 2 Game Over Party saw celebrities like NSYNC in its first year and Paris Hilton in its second year. In fact, the celebrity sightings and performances connected to PS2 events at that time are nearly limitless.
If readers don’t believe the PS2 was as much of a cross-cultural phenomenon as it seems, refer to this quote from “Friends” actor Matthew Perry in 2000.
“I used to have a social life, go on dates, go to dinner parties, have a job. Now all I do is sit in a big chair and play PlayStation 2,” Perry said, per Digital Journal. “I never leave my house. My friends have wondered what happened to me. Howard Hughes must have had one of these.”
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‘Shut the f**k up’: White House hammers New Yorker writer for trivializing National Guard members’ sacrifice
Two West Virginia National Guardsmen patrolling the national capital were shot the day before Thanksgiving, allegedly by a 29-year-old Afghan national who Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem indicated “was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration.”
While 24-year-old U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is reportedly still fighting for his life, Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom succumbed to her wounds on Thursday evening.
“My baby girl has passed to glory,” the fallen guardsman’s father, Gary Beckstrom, noted in a Facebook post on Thursday. “… This has been a horrible tragedy.”
‘Apologize and repent.’
Amid the general outpouring of prayers and support for the victims and their families, the New Yorker magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, Jane Mayer, decided to publicly trivialize the military members’ sacrifice.
“This is so tragic, so unnecessary, these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed,” wrote Mayer. “I live in DC and watched as they had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash. It was a political show and at what a cost.”
Mayer’s apparent suggestion that the National Guardsman who died and others overseeing a historic and transformative decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C., were glorified garbage pickers did not go over well with the American people and their White House.
White House communications director Steven Cheung, responding on X from his official account, wrote, “Jane, respectfully, shut the f**k up for trying to politicize this tragedy.
“They were protecting DC and trying to make the nation’s capital safer,” continued Cheung. “People like you who engage in ghoulish behavior lose all credibility. Not like you had any to begin with.”
Military members and civilians pray outside the hospital where the two wounded National Guardsmen were taken. Photo by Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images.
The official White House rapid response account similarly castigated the liberal journalist, writing, “You sick, disgusting ghoul. Two of these heroes were just SHOT IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. The Guard has saved countless lives — backed up by evidence (which you’re clearly too stupid to notice). They are American patriots.”
In August, President Donald Trump federalized the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard there in order to “re-establish law, order, and public safety” to a city that had a higher violent crime, murder, and robbery rate than all 50 states.
D.C. immediately witnessed a dramatic drop in crime.
There was a 44% decrease in violent crime in the first three weeks of the anti-crime initiative when compared to the same stretch the previous year and a 27% drop in crime from Aug. 11 through Oct. 15 relative to the same period in 2024. In addition to saving lives, the reduction in crime led to savings of over $450 million as of Nov. 4, according to the America First Policy Institute.
The White House was not alone in its disgust over Mayer’s remarks.
Georgia Rep. Mike Collins (R) responded, “Apologize and repent.”
“Stop supporting the murder of American soldiers,” wrote BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) wrote, “All these sick people on the Left do is blame the victims. I’m thankful for our guardsmen and praying for them and their families as they keep protecting the peace.”
While others similarly bashed Mayer over her rush to politicize the attack on the guardsmen by a suspect apparently imported by the Biden administration, some critics refuted the New Yorker writer’s narrative by providing accounts of critical actions taken by the National Guard in the District of Columbia.
For instance, Wallace White, a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation, noted, “On my walk back from work a few weeks back, a man was dangling off the ledge of the metro tracks at Farragut West clearly trying to commit suicide by train. If two national guardsmen weren’t there at the time, he’d be dead. These people are heroes.”
Logan Dobson, vice president of the political advertising agency Targeted Victory, noted that he lives in D.C. and that the city is safer thanks to the National Guard, adding on the basis of murder statistics, “Dozens of Washingtonians are alive today that wouldn’t be if not for the Guard.”
When confronted by Dobson with evidence of the drop in crime following the National Guard’s deployment to D.C., Mayer said, “I’ve covered crime in Washington since 1981- let’s skip the mansplaining. You can play with the stats but homicides were dropping before the troops got here.”
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