While Europe and Japan focused on gameplay with their first demo discs for the Sony PlayStation, North America charted a different course.

It surprised me that the first demo disc placed into North American PlayStations and had a laser beamed at it on the 9th of September 1995 was not chockful of game demos. Instead? Tech demos.

Say what?

Welcome to the Developer’s Demo Disc, which despite the name was a retail demo disc, acquired when you preordered your PlayStation. And unlike the pack-in Demo One discs of Europe, you were handed the Demo Disc by the counter clerk alongside your pre-order receipt.

Now, I’m sure some folks were all ‘Uh, what… am I supposed to with this until then?” To which the store clerk would have said…

Hear it Now! Play it Later!

As you can see from the image above, this was the tagline for this dual-nature demo disc. There are twelve tracks on the disc, only one of which is reserved for data. The rest are audio tracks from popular pop and rock bands at the time that fit in with the image that Sony of America wanted to project. So you’ve got Korn, Dag, Mother May I, and The The. This is what would keep your appetites whetted as the months dragged by until that magic day arrived.

Games? What Games?

I sincerely hope that anyone who picked up their PlayStation on September 9th also came home with a game or two as this is something that this disc lacks! What you get instead (as stated on the back of the slipcase) is a Demo Disc containing the original tech demos shown behind closed doors in 1993 and 1994 by Sony and Psygnosis to court potential developers and publishers into signing onto the system. Which, yes, clearly worked out!

So, what do you have to tinker around with?

One thing I’d recommend doing if you ever try this for yourself is to just vibe along to the menu music for a while. There are several tracks and I’ve been vibing along to them as I write this post.

Okay! Let’s go through them one by one. Some of their impact will be lost in still form, but we’ll still get a feel for them and what they wanted to show – and there are videos on YouTube if you want to see them in motion.

Balls

Start with one Gouraud-shaded ball bouncing around the screen. Then with the d-pad, steadily increase the number of balls to, well, I couldn’t count them all. No doubt this was a demonstration of the number of moving ‘sprites’ on the screen that can be handled at once. Quite a lot until FPS drops start kicking in!

Diffusion

I am not an especially technically minded person with computer graphics, but I see why this tech demo that has you moving through a looping expansion of coloured squares you can rotate at will is called Diffusion.

RCube

Now, this is a pretty nifty thing that demonstrates translucency and texture-mapping of cubes spinning at different speeds and in different directions. You can freely zoom and rotate them and cause them to explode outwards, scattering about everywhere. I imagine this was to show how polygonal objects can be used to create explosion debris?

Mat

Aha, now we come to my favourite of the tech demos: Mat. Little metal frogs jumping about and casting pretty high-detail shadows for the time. You can increase the number of chrome amphibians from one to two dozen or so. And though they may seem at first glance to be 3D objects, they are flat renders being moved, scaled, and rotated to appear to be 3D. Pretty impressive all the same!

Oden

Here we have the mysteriously named Oden. I couldn’t find much about what this term means, so I can only assume it has one for graphic artists. Oden demonstrates real-time coloured lighting on untextured and textured surfaces of the kind we’d see in games like Darklight Conflict and Colony Wars.

Edit: Future Sasha here in late 2025. At the time of writing this article, I didn’t spot that ‘Oden’ is related to food. Over on Bluesky, @rahankero was kind enough to clue me in that this is a reference to winter soup in both the name and the geometric shapes. Neat!

Movie

Now, this would have been one of the wow moments for those used to the grainy FMV of Sega CD. Movie is a sequence of scenes with a particular mid-90s multimedia encyclopaedia vibe followed by a somewhat unsettling atmosphere as the space bees roll in.

‘Movie’, using footage from an early Sony visual demo from 1990, demonstrates the clarity of the video footage and the dazzling range of colours, which is still impressive stuff with the mindset of earlier consoles that dabbled in live-action FMV. We’d rarely see full-screen FMV this clear in PlayStation games that used it!

I wonder what the gal featured is doing now?

Texture Movie

The make-up gal is back, this time wrapped around textured spheres that can be increased in size and number – up to three. A neat little demonstration!

Manta & Dino

Phew, we’re almost done. And I’ll put these two together as they’re much of a muchness and arguably the most famous PSX tech demos – Dino especially. I’ve heard from many developers that ‘Dino’ was the one that swung signing up to PlayStation in those clandestine meetings.

Manta gives you limited control over a 3D polygonal manta ray swimming majestically through the water surrounded by schools of flat-texture fish.

Dino! This one was featured on other early demo discs, like Europe’s Demo One and Japan’s DemoDemo Volume One. What’s interesting for me is that this is quite different to the Demo One Dino with a rendered background and some tribal music playing in the background. As with the other Dino Demos, you can manipulate the T-Rex to snarl, open its mouth, and pivot the camera around it as it walks.

Concluding thoughts

And there we have it! I’ve enjoyed digging into this demo disc again for this post. While it would not have satisfied anyone looking for a bit of gameplay to go with their shiny new console and I feel it’s a bit of an odd choice, it’s nonetheless an interesting curio of the technical prowess the PlayStation can do – one I recommend checking out and spending fifteen minutes tinkering around with.