Sony plays up PlayStation exclusives, rides nostalgia wave at video game conference

That's what Alex Evans, co-founder of game studio Media Molecule, said onstage at Sony's PlayStation 4 press conference when talking up his company's newest drawing game, Dreams.

In the age of never-ending sequels, remakes and reboots, Sony wore that theme on its sleeve here Monday evening to finish off the first day of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the game industry's biggest confab and marketing extravaganza.

The Japanese game company reiterated its theme of "best on PlayStation," promising players that its video game console will offer the most for their money, even if it doesn't have the most original of gaming experiences. The event contrasted with Microsoft's Xbox One press conference this morning, when the standout announcements were centered on using Internet services to tie together the PC and the Xbox and letting players access old games on new hardware.

Sony may not have an iconic franchise as popular as Nintendo's Super Mario or Microsoft's Halo. But the PlayStation 4 has become the most popular choice among console gamers who were initially frustrated by Microsoft's attempts to change the way games are played, bought and sold, requiring players to often connect to the Internet, and restricting game resales in exchange for creating an equivalent to the app stores made for smartphones and tablets. Sony's promise of consistency, and its $399 price tag coming in $100 less than the Xbox One at launch, forced Microsoft to change course.

While Microsoft has been rebuilding its image, Sony has attempted to cement its position as the leading game console for so-called multi-platform games, or titles available for many different types of hardware, but typically only played on a single device. The company says it's sold more than 20 million units of the PlayStation 4 and has gone to great lengths to hammer out exclusive deals with game makers to attract consumers to its platform instead of competitors' for the year's biggest games.

For instance, Bungie, which created the original Halo space-age shooting games, released game add-ons including weapons and game maps for the space shooter Destiny accessible only for PlayStation players -- a strategy that will continue when Destiny's newest expansion arrives in September, Sony said at E3 on Monday. Sony struck new exclusive deals to give PlayStation owners early access to Square Enix's next installment in the Hitman assassination series, the next Street Fighter fighting game and the next version of military shooter Call of Duty.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Syndicate stealth game will offer PlayStation players missions unavailable on Xbox and the next Disney Infinity game will come with an exclusive Star Wars figure in a PlayStation-only bundle.

In an announcement that received thunderous applause from the crowd, Square Enix is remaking one of the most influential and loved games in history, role-playing classic Final Fantasy VII, and will release the title for the PlayStation 4 before it arrives on other platforms. In another throwback, Sony gave screen time to Yu Suzuki, the creator of classic games for publisher Sega, to announce a third game in his historic Shenmue series, which strangely is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter to launch on the PlayStation 4 and PC. Within the hour, the game has raised more than $600,000 toward its $2 million goal.

But perhaps most dramatic differentiator for Sony is its plans to leap ahead of Microsoft with a device called Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset it has been developing since 2011. The device has become part of a wider industry movement toward virtual reality, with companies like Facebook's Oculus VR and Valve, as well as smartphone makers Samsung and HTC, creating various types of headsets planned for release throughout the next year. Those devices are being created to work with PC machines, and not game consoles.

"Morpheus is real, evolving and continues to capture the imagination of the game community, from small teams to the big developers," said Andrew House, president of Sony Computer Entertainment.

Sony's advantage against the competition is its PlayStation, for which the company has built teams of game developers creating specialized titles, including a Morpheus-exclusive first-person shooter called Rigs. Microsoft, meanwhile, has said it will team with Oculus to wirelessly stream video games from the Xbox One to its Rift headset, instantly giving the nascent virtual reality device access to a library of hundreds of games. It will bundle its Xbox One controller with the device as well. On Monday, Microsoft announced a separate partnership with Valve, further establishing the Xbox One platform as a bridge between the VR-ready PC and the living room game console.

Microsoft is also working on its own headset, called Hololens, which overlays computer images on transparent glasses looking out at the real world. Instead of creating virtual worlds to inhabit, as the Oculus headset does, Microsoft wants to meld the virtual with the real. Imagine a virtual television that can be placed on any wall in your home or software that turns your coffee table into a the setting for a video game.

The virtual reality race aside, Sony made it clear Monday that it wasn't necessarily interested in peddling visions of the future or trying to facilitate a distinct type of game playing. Instead, the company is reaching back into its past, to classic storylines and near-forgotten projects revived seemingly from the dead, and embracing an "old is new again" mentality.