As I’ve begun digging a little deeper outside of the retail PlayStation library I’ve come across enough examples of ancillary and esoteric memory card icons to gin up a whole new subset: the especially vague ‘Other Icon‘ category. This will include things like our friend The Oldest Memory Card Icon, the unreleased but completed Thrill Kill, and other developer samples, tech tools, and more. To officially introduce the category I wanted to highlight the latest entry because it’s probably the most readily accessible but also almost completely unknown.
If you purchased a new PlayStation beginning in April of 1998 (or later a PSone) -and- you used it to play a music CD -and- you happened to press the Select button while listening, then you might remember SoundScope. It was a collection of music visualizers with a surprising amount of customization options. You could cycle the colors, add a blur effect to the motion, change the polling rate of the visuals, and even scale the whole thing up or down.
But what you probably never did was read the User Manual that came with that PlayStation to find out that you could record your favorite actions and apply them to any of the visualizers. So, if you liked watching the colors cycle in a dizzying rainbow while also flashing that lovely blur effect, you could press a few button combinations and record that as a macro. Normally you’d have to recreate these actions if you turned off your PlayStation but Sony allowed you to save one single macro action to a memory card. And that’s where this delightful icon comes from!
Outside of the developer tools this has to be one of the rarest memory card icons because, like, who ever got so into the visualizers that they simply had to save their favorite treatment for later use? I admit, I had a fun time playing with SoundScope to get this memory card save but I didn’t feel like any one single macro would be that hard to recreate.
Still, I appreciate that they took the feature all the way and in the end it gave us one more unique icon to dig up. Oh, and the European maxim holds true here; it’s a one-block save so it only gets one frame of animation, even for a system level utility like SoundScope. Thanks for checking it out, dig into the rest of the Other Icons for more unexpected findings.
