You probably know the signature PlayStation boot sound. Did you know that it’s technically a multi-part chime? There’s the synthy section where “Sony Computer Entertainment” shows onscreen with a white background. You only get to the next screen with the echo-y chimes and the color-filled PlayStation logo if your console recognizes the disc. How badly I wanted my sorta-broken console to get to that second screen.
My console’s disc spindle came apart pretty early into me owning it. As an eight-year-old kid, fixing the spindle was the riskiest undertaking of my life yet. The internet wasn’t really a haven for how-tos yet, so I superglued that thing, and it worked, sort of. But the spindle is supposed to be flexible to let the disc on and off (it had a rubber ring with small ball bearings in there, too — the mechanisms were blowing my mind at the time). So, pieces came off regularly, and I would just glue them back on and keep gaming.
The wait for the second part of the boot chime to activate on my console was agonizing. It would sometimes take close to 10 seconds, or not happen at all. The upside is that it my gaming time more precious, and it made Hallmark’s new Keepsake ornament of the console hit harder than I expected it to.
The company’s running series of console replicas is great, and its previous one was the Xbox 360 replica last year. It’s cool to see one made for a console with an even bigger legacy (one that’s not tainted by a widespread hardware issue). The PlayStation changed my relationship with gaming, as well as my relationship with tech.
The ornament celebrates the pre-DualShock version of the console. There are a lot of lovely details, like the ridged sides, the power plug, and the A/V port that Sony stuck with through the PlayStation 3. The controller is glued to the disc lid of the console, and its flexible cable is partially glued to its side. Upon pressing the power button, a green LED lights up, and the PlayStation chime plays in full — both parts. There are a few little imperfections that I noticed on my unit out of the box, and the power button’s font is a little crooked, but nothing that’s easy to notice at a couple feet away.
$28.99 for the ornament will either seem a bit steep, or totally acceptable, depending on how nostalgia-addled you are for this era of gaming. I’ve always been the kind of gamer who likes what I like without having to be loud about it. The ornament, like Hallmark’s other Keepsake models, is elegant and not too flashy. It’s just a PlayStation that can chill in a tree come time for the holidays. It’s also a fun memento that represents a great console that I played to pieces that I can display whenever and wherever I want.
