October 26: PS2 Launches, Sajak Turns 80

Pat Sajak

1946 · TURNS 80

He took over Wheel of Fortune in 1981 and stayed put for over four decades, becoming the longest-running host of the same game show in American TV history before handing the podium to Ryan Seacrest in 2024. His deadpan asides to contestants outlasted several eras of studio sets and turntable designs.

Keith Urban

1967 · TURNS 59

The New Zealand-born, Australia-raised guitarist crossed over from Nashville session player to arena headliner through the 2000s, racking up multiple ACM and CMA Entertainer of the Year trophies along the way. He's also spent years as a coach's chair fixture on The Voice Australia.

Seal

1963 · TURNS 63

His breakthrough came with 1991's Killer, but it was Kiss From a Rose finding a second life on the Batman Forever soundtrack in 1995 that turned him into a Grammy-winning household name. His distinctive facial scarring, from a form of lupus, became as recognizable as the voice.

Natalie Merchant

1963 · TURNS 63

She fronted 10,000 Maniacs through the college-rock 1980s before going solo with 1995's Tigerlily, which turned Carnival and Wonder into inescapable radio staples. Her voice — low, deliberate, a little mournful — became a signature that outlasted the alt-rock moment that produced it.

Cary Elwes

1962 · TURNS 64

The British actor became Westley in 1987's The Princess Bride, a role that didn't make him a box office giant but did make him beloved for life among a certain kind of devoted rewatcher. He kept working steadily afterward, including a memorably grim turn in the original Saw.

Press Start: PlayStation 2 Launches

Sony's PlayStation 2 went on sale across North America on October 26, 2000, and the lines outside electronics stores the night before became their own small cultural event — a preview of the midnight-release ritual that would define console launches for the next two decades. Demand outstripped supply so badly that Sony's initial shipment sold out almost immediately, leaving plenty of hopeful buyers empty-handed on launch day itself.

What made the PS2 different wasn't just games — it was the built-in DVD player, which meant a lot of households bought their first DVD player because it happened to also play Tekken Tag Tournament. That dual purpose helped push it toward becoming the best-selling console of all time, a title it would hold for years afterward, with a library eventually stretching past 3,800 titles worldwide.

Twenty-six years on, the console's backward-compatible slim redesigns are still floating around secondhand shops, and its DVD-playing party trick reads as a quaint footnote in an era when consoles now stream everything. But in the fall of 2000, it was the reason kids were lying to their parents about how much the thing actually cost.

The Moment: Back to the Future's Big Date

October 26, 1985 isn't when Back to the Future opened — that was July 3 that year, and the film was already a runaway hit by fall. It's the date within the story itself: the night Marty McFly gets sent back to 1955, and the night, 30 years later in the plot's internal calendar, he's meant to return to set everything right.

The date stuck in a way few fictional calendar details do. Fans have marked it for decades the way others mark real anniversaries, and it laid the groundwork for the far bigger frenzy around October 21, 2015 — the film's other famous date, the one Marty travels forward to in Part II — which turned into a genuine cultural event with news anchors doing segments on hoverboards that didn't exist.

“Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.”

— Doc Brown, Back to the Future

Forty-one years after that in-story date, the film's tangle of internal continuity — plutonium, clock towers, a lightning bolt timed to the minute — still gets debated by people who've clearly watched it more times than is strictly healthy.

Meanwhile…