Sony embraces its PlayStation history | Opinion
Sony has always seemed reticent to make its software back catalogue into a central part of its current offering – but with the 30th anniversary approaching, attitudes may be changing
PlayStation turns 30 this year, and Sony is in a celebratory mood – admittedly, the kind of corporate celebratory mood that's largely expressed by trying to get people to buy more stuff, but don't those 30th anniversary consoles and controllers just look lovely?
The company is mining a powerful seam of nostalgia here; 30th anniversaries are a big deal for media properties precisely because the timing means that people who enjoyed them in their teens are now generally affluent and, in mid-life, extremely susceptible to any opportunity to recapture their youth through rose-tinted lenses.
All games companies are more than happy to use nostalgia as a selling point, but Sony's embrace of the 30th anniversary is arguably more notable than a similar approach from Nintendo would be, for example.
Nintendo is an absolute pro at mining nostalgia for profit, thoroughly embracing and exploiting its own back catalogue and history at every turn. Sony, while absolutely not adverse to launching the occasional limited-edition piece of hardware to capitalise on a big milestone, has always seemed rather more reticent about the role that its history and its back catalogue should play in the identity of PlayStation today.
As the company gears up the 30th anniversary hardware, though, there are also widespread signs that attitudes within Sony are changing in this regard; that the PlayStation back catalogue is finally being embraced for the strength it is.
It's not entirely clear why Sony hasn't been keen on promoting its software archives to the same extent as Nintendo, which is constantly re-releasing its games for new platforms, or Microsoft, which has made a huge deal out of backwards compatibility over the years. Sony just generally seemed much less interested in the idea of people playing old games.
It's been happy to celebrate PlayStation's history, of course, and at hardware transitions it has mastered the art of selling "remastered" versions of otherwise relatively recent games – but the real back catalogue of the early PlayStation games has often been left fallow to an extent unimaginable for the company's rivals.There are a number of potential reasons for this – PlayStation games were the first major generation of 3D titles and quite rough around the edges, which initially didn't attract as much fond nostalgia as the pixel art which preceded it. The hardware up to the PS3 generation was also complex and unusual, creating issues for emulation or porting.
Nonetheless, the decision to largely overlook such large swathes of back catalogue remains odd. It's certainly not something Sony's gaming division learned from the other media businesses at the company – the music and movie divisions at Sony had re-releases and remasters as their bread and butter for decades, and would likely have vapours at the notion that there was ever a point where potential purchase or streaming revenue was being left on the table by unavailable back catalogue.
As noted above, the demographics have been perfect for PlayStation nostalgia for a while now too. The original console released in 1994, meaning that it hit that nostalgia sweet spot (middle aged, with disposable income they're happy to spend on reliving teenage and early-twenties memories) some time ago, and the PS2 is now sliding into the same timeframe.
Nostalgia is a valuable opportunity to sell the same thing again to a customer who is now much better able to afford it; it's always been a little unusual that Sony has seemed slow to capitalise on it. There is certainly a shift in the air on that front, though. I wouldn't pin the change of heart on any one thing, nor would I say that the shift to a new mode of thinking is complete – but I wonder if, alongside the 30th anniversary focusing minds on the history of the platform, the immensely positive reaction to Astro Bot hasn't shifted the company's thinking a little.
The game's celebration of PlayStation's history and back catalogue generated an outpouring of goodwill – tinged with no small element of annoyance that so few of the back catalogue titles whose characters populate the game are actually available to play in any form on PS5.
It's probably not a direct reaction to this, per se, but it remains striking that this week's State of Play broadcast prominently featured two much-requested and prominently missing back catalogue titles, Soul Reaver and Lunar, returning in the form of remastered collections. Capcom's Dino Crisis turning up in emulated form was a nice bonus too, also answering a pretty common fan request.
Granted, this remains only a small fraction of what's missing. Even just taking Astro Bot's featured games into account, let alone the broader back catalogue, the scale of the task of getting the most important parts of Sony's gaming history playable on modern hardware is dramatic.
It's good news for nostalgic middle-aged people and the industry at large when gaming history is preserved, celebrated, and kept commercially relevant
It seems, however, that Sony and its partners are at least starting to take the demand for playable editions of key historic titles on modern hardware a bit more seriously. Again, I don't underestimate the challenge involved here; the complexity of those early consoles and the challenge of updating games for which source code and original assets are often lost is significant. That is at least part of the reason why the PS Plus 'retro' section remains somewhat anaemic, containing only a small fraction of the catalogue it purports to represent.
However, the appetite for games of the PS1 and PS2 era has arguably never been greater; it's very telling, I think, that developers are now deliberately emulating the look of those early 3D titles in contemporary games, suggesting that just as pixel art enjoyed its moment of nostalgic glory, the low-polygon, glitchy 3D of the 1990s and early 2000s is now finding its place in the sun. If that moment really is coming around, the value of PlayStation as a platform is only enhanced and magnified by having as much of its history as possible available and playable.
It's baby steps so far, of course – and at every step, people whose personal nostalgic favourite hasn't been updated will of course lament that Sony seemingly doesn't care about its fans. Nonetheless, it's worth celebrating that the process is finally moving forward – it's good news for nostalgic middle-aged people and the industry at large when gaming history is preserved, celebrated, and even kept commercially relevant.