PlayStation Demo Discs

From the PlayStation's 1995 U.S. launch era, the demo disc was how you met new games: sampler discs came packed in with consoles and stapled to magazine covers, each one a grab bag of playable levels, trailers, and menu music that burned itself permanently into memory. For a kid with one or two full games, the demo disc wasn't advertising — it was a game, replayed until every second of every demo was memorized.

Sony turned the freebie into an institution. PlayStation Underground, launched in March 1997, was a mail-order fan club whose 'magazine' was itself a pair of CD-ROMs — playable demos, developer interviews, cheat codes, behind-the-scenes footage — and it ran through 2001, while retail Jampack compilations put whole discs of demos on store shelves. The stunt everyone remembers came in 1999, when Sony and Pizza Hut gave away PlayStation demo discs with pizza orders: an entire generation ate mediocre pizza to get a silver disc out of the box on top.

The ritual faded in the PS2 era as discs gave way to downloadable demos and, eventually, to trailers you just watched instead of levels you played. What's left is surprisingly warm nostalgia for what was, technically, marketing material — and a collector market where Underground issues, Jampacks, and the Pizza Hut discs trade as artifacts of the last era when trying a game meant holding it.