Hear It Now, Play it Later Demo Disc

Variants

The Hear It Now version is the pre-order bonus. The Developer’s Demo was the pack-in version added to consoles. The discs are different, so pay close attention to whether it says Developer’ Demo Disc or Demo CD – it’s the easiest tell.

Cardboard Sleeve and Pack-In Release

Misprints

• There are no known misprints.

Contents

Okay, biased comment coming:

This was probably the coolest marketing idea ever made for its time frame.

In a modern world with viral web marketing, multi-million dollar ad campaigns, and sponsorships all over the place, the Sony PlayStation’s original tease for the consumer was nothing but a compact disc. That is…a disc with a secret. When consumers pre-ordered the PlayStation system, they received the “Hear It Now! Play It Later!” demo.

The concept was that it started as a free music CD and thank you for the reserve. When the disc was played in a regular music CD player, you got to hear several album songs from Sony bands with tracks by Dag, Dandelion, Korn, Mother May I, and The The.

Between bands were video game music tracks and radio DJ-like announcements, mixed with bizarre voice-overs. These voice-overs were essentially the viral part of the marketing. Some were sound bites from various games, others were the announcer spewing out random babble that you would only know what it meant once you had the game. For example, he calls out EIji’s special Hidden Move from Battle Arena Toshinden.

Once the PlayStation was released on that fateful September 9th, the demo disc transformed into a tech demo of various programmer tricks the system could perform. Each demo is related to a specific function like textures, lighting, object manipulation, scaling, or full motion video.

Arguably the most famous demo of the disc was the animated T-Rex. The ‘roar heard round the world’ was a recreation of the then other famous T-Rex: Jurassic Park’s, released 2 years earlier. Allowing players to control their actions, including roaring and head-turning, was the talk of the town. It also marked a true milestone for the home consoles – despite the 3DO and Jaguar coming first with 3D graphics, the PlayStation was the first to force it into the limelight, so much so that Sony tried to downplay most 2D games.

With the sampler now being decades old, returning to the demo provides the same sense of awe it did so long ago. Simple marketing tricks like this will be forever lost to time in the modern world of social media.

Here’s to playing it now.

Screenshots

• There are no screenshots for this game yet.

Videos

• There are currently no videos for this game.

Trivia

• One of the few discs to not have a known PSRM.
• 15 years later and only now do I catch a weird audio glitch in the game. If you leave the demo disc at the menu selection screen, every so often the music tracks will glitch into an audio clip of ESPN Games. This particular track was only supposed to be heard with the demo disc inside a regular music CD player.
• In a CD player, the disc is divided into several sequences – Several intro voice-overs, real band music, and a mix and match of the playable demos’ background music and announcer quips. You need to skip track 1 – that’s game programming.
• The Video portion – in which a girl applies make-up and random city montages fly by – may seem odd for a game system demo, but it served two purposes. First, it showed that the PlayStation was capable of full-screen video, especially compared to the Saturn and Sega CD. Second, it showed off how you could see the textures on the make-up, the girl’s cheeks, and hair.
• The Manta demo could have been the inspiration behind Aquanaut’s Holiday…