PlayStation Broadband Navigator

» see jp.playstation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Sony sold Japan a thing it sold almost nowhere else: an internal hard disk for the PlayStation 2, bundled with a network adaptor as the BB Unit. The disk by itself was storage. PlayStation Broadband Navigator was the software that made it a computer, a dashboard that booted off the drive instead of off a game and that treated the console as a place where files lived.

The first version shipped as a pre-release, 0.10, bundled with BB Units in early 2002, replacing the plain HDD Utility Disc that came before it. The executable inside it is dated 21 May 2001, which the disc preservation database redump has on record, so the thing had been in development for the better part of a year before anyone got it. Version 0.20 arrived late in 2002 and taught it to update itself over broadband. Version 0.30 in mid-2003 added an email client and a hook into feega, Sony's billing service for monthly online game fees.

Version 0.32 came out in early 2004 and was the last one. Its only recorded change was a removal: the Audio Player vanished from the Music Channel, and with it the ability to move music between the hard disk and a MiniDisc player over USB. A console that could feed a MiniDisc deck existed for roughly two years, in one country, and then quietly stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was on it ~

The browser was NetFront 3.0, running on Linux, on a games console, in 2002. The Music Channel ripped audio CDs straight to the internal disk and organized them for playback. Picture and video channels read from USB storage and kept libraries on the drive. There was a launcher for games installed to the hard disk, which was the feature with the longest afterlife.

Then there were the channels, which is the part that has no modern equivalent. Publishers ran their own sections inside the dashboard. Capcom and Koei had channels, and so did Namco and Bandai. Konami's gave away its back catalog as downloads. Hudson's handed over old games including Binary Land. Namco put demos of Taiko no Tatsujin and the Tales series behind a library tab. EA's portal ran industry news and let players send questions to the people making the games. SCEJ used its own channel to run Everybody's Golf Online in 2003, and Koei's GAMECITY channel sold currency for Nobunaga's Ambition Online.

~ the region lock ~

The install disc carried a lock stricter than ordinary PS2 software. It would only boot on an NTSC-J console whose model number ended in zero, which meant a unit sold in Japan and nothing else. Importing the disc did not help, because the console itself had to be Japanese. Sony Computer Entertainment America did eventually sell the hard disk, on 23 March 2004, bundled with Final Fantasy XI and a utility disc numbered 1.01 and no Navigator at all. Americans who had read about PSBBN asked why and got an answer nobody remembers being satisfied by. The official SCEA hard disk message board closed on 14 June 2005.

My own distance from this is a modem. In 2002 I was eighteen, in Turkey, on a dial-up line that had worked its way up to 56k, and broadband at home was still four years off. A console with its own hard drive and a web browser, streaming publisher channels over a fat pipe, was not a product I was missing out on so much as a description of a different decade, happening in a country whose hardware would have refused the disc anyway.

~ the next chapter ~

Sony announced the end on 10 March 2016 through its Japanese support site, and the online services behind Broadband Navigator went dark on 31 March. Gematsu carried the notice in English. Fourteen years is a long run for a dashboard that stopped being updated in 2004, and the explanation is that almost nothing was left to turn off by then. The channels had emptied years earlier, and feega had no games left to bill anybody for.

What died was the network half. The software still boots on the consoles it was locked to, and still launches games off the drive, which is the one function that never needed anyone else's machine to be switched on. The discs themselves are cataloged and preserved, pre-release 0.10 included, by people who understood before Sony did that a dashboard is also a document.

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