Wanted to give a huge thanks to Ben James, John Biank, Robert Dale Smith and the rest of you who reached out and told me your Net Yaroze Story. If you worked on the Net Yaroze, let me know in the comments or send me an email. Id love to hear your story. Enjoy the video !

Sony: Creates affordable SDK for hobbyists to break into console game development
Also Sony: Takes Linux support off of PS3 due to fear of  hobbyists  breaking into console

Yes! I remember buying the official PlayStation magazine and sometimes had full games built from yaroze in their monthly demo disc.

Me and my brother must have had several dozen PS1 demo discs from magazines in the UK and some of the Net Yaroze games were our most played. Hours of entertainment crammed into these small games for the price of a magazine meant we played a lot of them. The demo discs were always a lot easier to justify to our parents than a full game was, so shoutout for to these devs, big part of my childhood right here.

That brings back memories. I had a Skywalker serial cable and a modded PlayStation so I could do my coursework at home instead of the computing labs. I'm pretty sure we were already working with OpenGL so having to deal with fixed point arithmetic for 3D transformations was a real eye opener.

17:04 "Sony has never been afraid to experiment with their hardware and open it up to the hobbyist bedroom coder." Well, they weren't until they removed "Other OS" from the PS3.

I really wanted one of these when I was in high school... but it was a good thing that it was so expensive and so hard to get one for a casual player.  Because this would have been way way beyond my abilities to handle.  I would not have been able to do anything with this, I didn't understand what it really took to create a game back then.  It would have been wasted money for me.

2:20....when I heard that ancient PlayStation boot SFX, I actually rewound it just to hear that delicious ear candy again.
Man that is a fucking legendary console.

never thought i'd hear net yaroze said so many times in 20 mins

My older brother bought this when it came out and I remember tinkering with it. I didn't get very far (I was still a kid at the time) but remember compiling simple code with it. I am a programmer by profession today so I guess it helped push me along towards my career.  I still have it and the SDK package on display in my house.  Beautiful piece of hardware.

A chipped standard PS1 with a flashed Action Replay cart connected by parallel cable to PC was a hundred times more useful for development and cost a third of the Yaroze. Using a chipped retail PSX for dev, you could run code directly from the PC without the need for the memory card dongle, you could access CD storage, and it created standard PSX format ELF binaries so you could burn the finished game to a CD which would boot on any chipped PSX. Back in the day we looked on the Yaroze as a fun toy, but not useful for actual development.

10:30 - Oh my god! I remember Blitter Boy! It was on one of the demo discs, along with a bunch of other games.
12:30 - Terra too! Oh my gosh. So much nostalgia.

I always had a huge fascination with the Net Yaroze when I heard about it from one of my Playstation Underground discs... unfortunately I was only a kid when it came out and we didnt exactly have 750 dollars to spend on it so all I could do was admire it and play the demos they displayed... but I loved the games that were made and the stories behind Net Yaroze and it was always in the back of my mind since.

I've actually been thinking about Net Yaroze lately with the official release of Dreams on the PS4. It feels like creation tools has always gone hand in hand with Sony Playstation (minus the PS2 but that had Linux support) - Net Yaroze, Little Big Planet, Dreams. It feels like sony has always wanted to give people a chance to create something Digitially depending on knowledge and patience.

Man, that PS1 start up sound gives me chills... Pure nostalgia taking me way back. Giving me many good memories.

"Most of them weren't very good, but there some impressive standouts!"; Sounds like modern indie-games to me!

Playstation: The best startup sound of ANY console EVER.

I bought a NetYaroze from Sony back in the late 90's. Back then I was making (euro)demos on the Amiga and the intention was to make demo's on the Yaroze to be used in wild-competetions at demo-partys. However I got distracted with all sorts of other things and never really got very far with that project (also at the time I found C annoying since I was used to m68k assembler). At one point I was interviewed for a PS developer position but did not get the job since I did not really have any proper demos up and running on Yaroze - if I had I would proberbly have had a career in game development.

Guess my NetYaroze is for sale now, at the current prices I might almost recoup my original investment lol - "investment by bying hardware" thats new ;-)

I remember playing demo discs, that came with Finnish version of PlayStation magazines. I always wondered what were those games, that felt different from the rest. Nice to know they were indies. Also, didn't know Devil Dice was originally Net Yaroze game! I bet our demo disc had retail version for sure, but that has stuck in my mind for years.

11:47 "...but in late 1987..."
Are you sure about that?