PlayStation 2
Sony's second home video game console, part of the sixth generation of consoles
The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on March 4, 2000, in North America on October 26, in Europe on November 24, in Australia on November 30, and other regions thereafter. It is the successor to the original PlayStation as well as the second installment in the PlayStation brand of consoles. As a sixth-generation console, it competed with Nintendo's GameCube, Sega's Dreamcast, and Microsoft's Xbox.
Announced in 1999, Sony began developing the console after the immense success of its predecessor. In addition to serving as a game console, it featured a built-in DVD drive, enhancing its value. Full backward compatibility with original PlayStation games and accessories gave it access to a vast launch library, far surpassing those of its competitors. The console's hardware was also notable for its custom-built Emotion Engine processor, co-developed with Toshiba, which was promoted as being more powerful than most personal computers of the era.
The PlayStation 2 remains the best-selling video game console of all time, having sold 160 million units worldwide—nearly triple the combined sales of competing sixth-generation consoles. It received widespread critical acclaim and amassed a global library of over 4,000 game titles, with 1.54 billion copies sold.
“PlayStation 2” enters the record as sony's second home video game console, part of the sixth generation of consoles. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what PlayStation, Sony's and second can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“PlayStation 2” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, PlayStation, Sony's and second provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10680. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000 and 1999.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “PlayStation 2” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.