The 12 best British PS1 games to celebrate its 30th anniversary in the UK

How many did you know were British? (Metro/Embracer Group/Rockstar Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment)

With the PS1 turning 30 in the UK, GameCentral highlights the console’s best games from British studios, including Psygnosis and Core Design.

While the PlayStation 1 officially turned 30 last year, it didn’t arrive in the West until 1995, making this year a sort of second anniversary for Sony’s original games console.

Earlier this month, to mark the PS1’s American launch, a list of the console’s best-selling games in the region was shared, but we want to do something slightly different for the anniversary of its launch in the UK.

The following is a list of the best PS1 games made here in the UK, as a tribute to both the console itself and a lost era of British game development.

Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars (1996)

For a game all about an American tourist and French journalist going on an Indiana Jones-esque adventure, to unravel an ancient conspiracy tied to the Knights Templar, you wouldn’t think Broken Sword was conceived by a team based in York.

Boasting an excellent mystery plot and graphics that still hold up nearly 30 years later, this is considered one of the classic point ‘n’ click adventure games of the era.

Fortunately, it saw an updated remaster for PC and modern consoles just last year (one that lets you toggle between the new and original graphics) and both the Broken Sword series and developer Revolution Software are still chugging along. A new entry – subtitled Parzival’s Stone – was announced in 2023, although it currently lacks a release date.

Colin McRae Rally 2.0 (2000)

We’d be remiss not to include at least one game by Codemasters, one of the oldest British developers out there – although they’re no longer independent and are now owned by EA. The Southam studio dipped its fingers in a few genres on the PS1, but its most famous output was in the racing genre, in particular the Colin McRae Rally series.

The original 1998 game is equally deserving of being on this list, for its tight racing gameplay and authenticity (also its iconic alien abduction Easter egg), but we opted to give the slot to its sequel for its new arcade mode and cleaner graphics. It’s a shame neither game is easily available and probably won’t be re-released due to licensing issues.

Codemasters did keep the series going, rebranding it to DiRT, but the last entry was Dirt 5 in 2020. The studio’s partnership with the World Rally Championship looked set to fill the void, but earlier this year EA announced the deal was over after just one game, with Codemasters abandoning the rally racing genre altogether.

Die Hard Trilogy (1996)

Before it was shut down in 2000, Probe Software was best known for ports and movie tie-ins, including the legendary Mega Drive version of Mortal Kombat. It was also responsible for Die Hard Trilogy, which was very well thought of at the time.

As the name suggests, it covers the first three Die Hard movies, although interestingly each was adapted in a different gameplay style: a third person shooter, an on-rails shooter, and a first person driving game – essentially making it three games in one.

We also want to give special mention to another PS1 Probe movie tie-in that launched the same year: Alien Trilogy. It wasn’t a great game but it was one of the first mainstream successes for a first person shooter on consoles.

Driver (1999)

Nothing about Driver feels particularly British (you’re driving on the wrong side of the road for a start) yet it was made by Newcastle studio Reflections Interactive. Unlike racing sims, Driver gives you free rein to crash and dent your car so long as you complete your mission.

You play as a cop working undercover in a crime syndicate, bringing vehicular mayhem across four open world American cities. The opening tutorial mission is bizarrely difficult but get past that and you’ll find an innovative game that strikes an interesting balance between being a realistic driving sim and a slightly wackier arcade experience.

Driver would see a small handful of sequels up until 2011, but it seems to have been abandoned now. Reflections Interactive is still around but they were bought out by Ubisoft and haven’t put out a new game of their own since 2017.

Grand Theft Auto (1997)

Most casual gamers would probably be shocked to learn that GTA is made in Scotland, although not from girders. The original game was made in Edinburgh by Lemmings creator DMA Design, who were later renamed as… Rockstar North (irritatingly, the only Rockstar studio that doesn’t have the name of its city or country in its name).

The original, top-down GTA games feel very antiquated when compared to later entries like GTA 5, with the franchise only becoming the giant it is today after series creator Toby Jones left the company and the Houser brothers took control of the series, starting with GTA 3 on the PlayStation 2.

Nevertheless, the original game still offered as much freedom as the PS1 could allow, with many elements still appearing in modern games, including the names of all the cities. There were four GTA games on the original PlayStation, including two spin-offs set in London – the only time GTA has been set in a real-world location or anywhere outside of North America.

Theme Hospital (1998)

Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions was always more of a home computer developer but for a long while they were seen as one of the UK’s top studios and several of their games did end up on the PS1, including Theme Park and Theme Hospital.

A farcical depiction of running a hospital could’ve come across as being in poor taste, but Bullfrog circumvented this by inflicting its patients with silly, fictional illnesses (like one that makes people impersonate Elvis), with your role being to construct and manage the hospital.

Despite lacking PlayStation Mouse support and thus having some awkward controls, Theme Hospital remains Bullfrog’s best PS1 game and, sadly, the last of its kind as after being bought out by EA the studio began to decline and was eventually closed.

Fortunately, its legacy lives on through Two Point Studios, which debuted with the excellent spiritual successor Two Point Hospital in 2018. Said game revels in its British origins and has sparked a new series of comedic business sims, with the latest being Two Point Museum.

Tomb Raider (1996)

Perhaps the most obvious pick for this list, Lara Croft may be in the hands of American studio Crystal Dynamics now, but she remains a British icon. If you didn’t grow up in the 90s, you have no idea how much of a celebrity she was back then.

At the time having a female main character was almost unheard of, but Tomb Raider was also a good game, offering an innovative blend of gunplay, exploration, puzzle solving, and slow-paced platforming.

It’s also one of the first fully 3D games many people will have played, coming out a few months after Super Mario 64 in Japan but five months before it in the UK.

The original game has aged quite gracefully, especially thanks to the recent remaster that pretties up the graphics and offers a more traditional control scheme for those who can’t stand tank controls. There’s supposed to be a new game in development that takes at least some influence from the original trilogy but sadly nothing has been heard about that for years.

Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear To The Rescue (1999)

Cheshire based Traveller’s Tales has been around since 1989 and before they hit the big time with their myriad of Lego games, including the new Lego Batman announced last month, they made a lot of other licensed games.

To this day, anyone who owned a PS1 as a kid swears by the Toy Story 2 game, as one of the best movie tie-ins ever made. Some of that can be chalked up to nostalgia, but even without rose-tinted glasses, this is a solid 3D platformer that greatly expands on the source material and offers fun level design and boss fights.

It might be trivially easy to any seasoned gamers, but it’s worth checking out if you have a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription. It was even the service’s most popular PS1 game for a spell, although that was also due to how few PS1 games were actually available at the time.

Urban Chaos (2000)

A couple of years after Bullfrog was acquired by EA, a handful of staff left to form another Guildford studio, called Mucky Foot Productions, and for a short while they were seen as the next big hope for the UK development scene.

Their first game was Urban Chaos, which was praised for its graphics and 3D action gameplay, as you enacted vigilante justice against large groups of enemies across a series of free-roaming maps. It was perhaps a bit over ambitious for the PS1 but it had some very impressive visuals for the time.

It also broke new ground by starring a black woman as its protagonist, something that still rarely happens nowadays. Unfortunately though, it was an enormous flop and plans for a sequel were canned, alongside several others, when the studio closed in 2003.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (2000)

This might seem like a random pick but the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? video game was huge in the UK. Developed by Bristol studio Hothouse Creations, this thing sold 624,000 copies on the PS1 and managed to outsell Pokémon the year it came out.

It’s also the first UK made video game to ever reach the 1 million sales mark and held onto the number one spot in the sales charts for 18 weeks straight; a record which has never been topped since. Those are phenomenal results for an adaptation of a TV quiz show that was incredibly boring to play even at the time.

It was just as important to British publisher Eidos’ success as Tomb Raider but sadly that didn’t help developer Hothouse Creations, which was shut down in 2007.

WipEout (1995)

Longtime readers will know how we continue to mourn the loss of Psygnosis, the Liverpool studio responsible for a suite of beloved British classics on the Amiga and Atari ST. It was bought by Sony in 1993, primarily for its experience with, what was at the time, nascent CD-ROM technology.

WipEout was their biggest hit of the PlayStation era, with not only cutting edge technology but ground-breaking use of licensed music, from the likes of Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers.

You wouldn’t necessarily guess it was British to play it (it’s basically just a F-Zero style future racer) but it aesthetic and techno soundtrack was purposefully attuned to Europe tastes and the game was nowhere near as popular in Japan or North America. Which is not something Sony, or any other publisher, worries about nowadays.

While the original WipEout will probably never see a re-release, thanks to all the licensed music, the 2017 Omega Collection for PlayStation 4 is a more than suitable alternative. Hopefully, so will the upcoming racing game from Starlight Games – another Liverpool studio consisting of former Psygnosis staff.

Worms Armageddon (1999)

No list of British studios would be complete without Team17, who are nowadays best known as an indie publisher but owed much of their early success to the Worms series, even if the original relied on the mouse controls of the Amiga.

The Worms games are beloved for being a comedic take on the ancient artillery game concept, where you have to judge the trajectory of shells fired from, in this case, weapon toting annelids.

While Worms continues to this day, Armageddon remains one of the series’ most popular entries. It’s telling that Sony picked it as one of the first PS1 games to add to the PlayStation Plus Premium service – although last year’s anniversary edition may be the best way to play it, since it’s multiplatform and comes with a few other Worms games too.

Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

MORE: The original Sony PlayStation was the most important console ever made

MORE: 25 years of PlayStation – the 10 games that defined the PS1

MORE: 30 years of PlayStation and it never got better than Ridge Racer – Reader’s Feature

Comments