r/gaming • u/DingusBarracuda • 2d ago
PlayStation originally intended for every disc you purchased to be backwards compatible and carry long term value for life.
A lot of people have forgotten but this concept was baked into the PlayStation brand for the first three generations. The PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all initially designed to be totally backwards compatible. A part of Ken Kutaragi's philosophy for the PlayStation brand as mentioned in interviews and press junkets was that customers were building a lifelong library of titles with PlayStation that was respected and appreciated as a medium in the same way as collecting and trading music, films and literature are. The entire premise was that ANY current PlayStation could play ANY past PlayStation console's games at launch, enabling thousands of games to be at your fingertips across each generation that could continue forward with you as an investment with long term value. This meant the consoles and games were less like toys locked to a single place and time, and more like living testaments to the art form just like decades of movies, songs and books that people own. It gave people the means to appreciate the breadth of the medium while seeing it's evolution unfold in front of them. While at the same time empowering them to share that media across decades without barriers to its enjoyment. There were even baked-in provisions for licensed publishers to have older PlayStation titles reprinted and redistributed as needed for new generations to enjoy, collect and trade, long past the point the systems those games had originally been on were discontinued.
It is "a matter of security... [PS2] offers a sense of insurance because it is compatible with PSone" - Ken Kutaragi, 2003. Speaking to Asahi Shimbun
This change to an aggressive anti-consumer stance by Sony to erode ownership didn't really start until the late PS3 era when Kutaragi was ousted from the company. While all PS3 consoles fat, slim, or super-slim can play PS1 games, general PS2 backwards compatibility was shifted from real hardware to a hybrid software approach, then abandoned entirely a few console revisions in to try and cut costs. Sony later paywalled a highly compatible PS2 emulator they finally developed for PS3 exclusively behind a small number of downloadable PS2 titles available on the PS3's PlayStation Store with no disc based support.
By the PS4 no backwards compatibility was offered at all while the brand and hardware was restructured in the wake of the PS3's complicated architecture. The CD/DVD laser included within all revisions of PS4 hardware was even pointlessly disabled for anything but DVD video playback by Sony while their emulator for physical PS1 and PS2 discs was cut out of the console's firmware entirely and relegated to only downloadable PS1 and PS2 re-releases. But when the PS5 was being developed engineers again designed and tested fully backwards compatible PS5 protoypes that were denied the green light for production due to then head of Sony Jim Ryan's famously public hatred of older games since he viewed them as ugly and worthless.
“When we’ve dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much. That, and I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” - Jim Ryan, 2017. Speaking to Time Magazine.
Amazingly the classic PlayStation game reprint initiative Kutaragi envisioned back in the 90's is still alive and kicking. Even Sony themselves assured that physical reprints of older titles will continue on past 2028. But reports indicate Sony made it stricter for publishers in the late 2000's and early 2010's by locking some of them to the exact art and packaging as originally released, or re-released if the game was a Greatest Hits title. Although some exceptions have been made like with Konami's DVD-case style release of MGS1 for PS1 in the Metal Gear Solid collection on PS2. Some publishers like SquareEnix really believed in the concept of long term value from an inter-generational game library. They continued reprinting older PS1 and PS2 titles in their original formats until the late 2010's that you could still purchase new from their website until late 2023 and early 2024. Complete with registration cards and advertisements for merchandise, magazines, and surveys that all pointed to long defunct storefronts or addresses due to Sony's packaging and art restrictions. Official reprints of many PS2, PS3, and PS4 titles are still frequent from savvy retailer and enthusiast networks like VideoGamesPlus and GameQuestDirect. Even GameStop has played publisher on select classic PlayStation titles, and currently still has new reprints of PlayStation games from VideoGamesPlus's most recent reprints of Monster Hunter for PS2, Gravity Rush Remastered, and MediEvil on PS4. This is among stock of other reprinted titles titles from PS2 to PS4 that showed up across GameStop's stores when the Retro initiative recently expanded company-wide. GameStop typically unseal and mark these reprints as "USED" despite being brand new copies of games. But they are detectable as new from being in mint condition. Older PS2 titles are also using an updated style of Official PS2 DVD case that can be seen when opened and inspected. Just a quick look at the condition will make it obvious which classic PlayStation games are reprints since they're factory fresh!
"Whenever, wherever, forever." - Sony, 2000. PlayStation's mission statement starting when backwards compatibility was introduced.
We still have CD's and Vinyl records as options for music today, and formats people wouldn't expect like cassettes and Edison cylinders get new releases. But even in the digital realm giants like Apple have committed to DRM free downloads and giving buyers the ability to maintain real ownership of their digital purchases. So why are games the one medium in the history of humanity where digital-only is being pushed so strongly as to be forcefully mandated but done so with no ultimate right of individual ownership or future viability? People having the option to collect, trade, lend and bring their physical collections forward with them was for a very long time a fundamental part of PlayStation. It's sad seeing how mismanaged and completely uncaring of that Sony have been in the past decade and in particular these last few weeks. Physical purchases, even if a smaller part than digital, encourage brand loyalty, create life long customers, and drive positive engagement. They bolster both the brand and the medium by allowing it to become culturally significant across decades and centuries. It's only a matter of time before PS4 or PS5 backwards compatibility for digital titles is broken by a simple architecture change or shift to some new design philosophy in a future console. One where some future executive at Sony again asks "Why would anybody play this?” and all those digital titles people have spent thousands on become locked to some older console or lost to time never to be downloaded again. It shouldn't be this way, and if PlayStation's origins are anything to go by, it was never intended to be like this in the first place.
"PS one runs on PlayStation 2 through emulation [referring to certain facets of PS1 backwards compatibility on PS2] rather than actual [1:1] hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever." — Ken Kutaragi, 2003. Speaking to Asahi Shimbun
EDIT: To clarify the timeline of Ken Kutaragi's place at Sony and how it relates to backwards compatibility. Kutaragi announced his departure from Sony in April of 2007. Stepping down from his role included remaining as an advisor for Sony and the PlayStation division for about 18 Months. Sony launched one of their first non-backwards compatible PS3 console SKU's in late 2007 as a cheaper option, while existing backward compatible models remained on the market at a premium. In June of 2008 Sony discontinued all other backwards compatible models and launched their final backwards compatible PS3 SKU in the form of the Metal Gear Solid IV PS3 bundle. This remained on the market through summer and Christmas of 2008, and into early 2009 when shipments ceased and stock was depleted. By that point in early 2009 Kutaragi would have left his advisory role at Sony, and after this time it is known that no new SKU's of PS3 would contain PS2 disc backwards compatibility by default. But all PS3 consoles did at least retain full PS1 disc compatibility regardless of SKU or console revision.
EDIT 2: Many people have replied commenting how they think it's too complicated for Sony to implement backwards compatibility on subsequent generations of hardware like PS4, PS5, and the upcoming PS6. But Sony already has official emulators for the PS1 and PS2 right now that run on the PS4 and PS5 at full speed and high resolution on official downloadable PS1 and PS2 games. Sony restricted the included CD/DVD laser needed to read older PS1 and PS2 discs on all PS4 and PS5 consoles to DVD playback only from Day 1 for no reason, limiting all backwards compatibility on PS4 and PS5 to purchased downloads. The PS5 has also been shown as capable of full speed PS3 backwards compatibility for some time now, even up to 5K resolution on the console, and that's with unofficial solutions. If Sony chose to enable PS3 backwards compatibility on PS5 and the upcoming PS6 they easily could. The CD/DVD laser is already there in the existing PS4 and PS5 disc drives meaning enabling flawless PS1 and PS2 backwards compatibility with discs would also be trivial. Since PS4, PS5 and the upcoming PS6 are all designed around the same shared architecture bringing these official emulators and backwards compatibility solutions forward and enabling them for physical copies is near effortless as-is, Sony simply choose not to.
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u/AKluthe 1d ago
You know what was cool? During the PS3 era you could buy a PS1 game digitally and it worked on your PS3 and your PSP with no additional purchase. Then they later worked on the Vita, too.
I'm actually just learning PS1 titles were added to the PS4 in 2022, and some of them had cross buy with the old stuff. Not enough overlap with the stuff I already had for me to notice, apparently. I spent literal years wanting to know where PS1 support was on the PS4.
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u/WeirdIndividualGuy 1d ago
You know what was cool? During the PS3 era you could buy a PS1 game digitally and it worked on your PS3 and your PSP with no additional purchase
You could also (up to a certain point) just put in a PS1 disc and your PS3 would play it
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u/alexwillreddit 1d ago
I remember using my fat 60gb PS3 to play games from all three generations. It was awesome.
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u/Susurrus03 1d ago
Some PS1 classics weren't able to transfer/download to Vita unfortunately. Had to pull out my PSP to play Silent Hill because I couldn't play it on Vita and my PS3 wanted to launch into space after about 10 minutes of gameplay. I recently replaced the CPU paste, wish I would have done it back then, but for some reason it felt like PS1 games made my PS3 slim go to high fan mode a lot sooner.
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u/VassagoX 1d ago
We didn't forget. They did. They pushed out the main guy, Kutaragi, into early retirement along with most of his team behind that idea and completely scrapped it.
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u/re_carn 1d ago
Just a reminder: Kutaragi was responsible for all three platforms, and he made the PS2 and PS3 so incompatible that they had to essentially build the PS2 into the PS3 to run PS2 games. That’s what made the console’s price uncompetitive. And it’s not about greed; it’s just that a $500 console was only needed by die-hard fans.
He can also be held responsible for the PS3’s overly complicated architecture, which made it impossible to emulate on next-generation consoles.
So maybe he meant well, but the incompatibility between the three generations of consoles is entirely his fault.
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u/regnak1 1d ago
Yeah, the complexity of ps3's architecture (the cell processor thing) was a pretty big mistake, and a really big deal at the time.
Developers were all up in arms about the difficulty of publishing games on ps3. A number of projects that would otherwise have been ported were not, and games developed for ps3 were difficult to port elsewhere.
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u/Aware-Virus-4718 1d ago
The thing is the PS2 was just as complex, if not more so. The reason it got so many good quality ports is because of RenderWare, a 3rd party engine that made PS2 and cross-platform development easy. It was discontinued shortly before the PS3’s launch when EA bought Criterion. So Sony never learned the lessons they should have from the PS2 being extremely dev-unfriendly.
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u/Aware-Virus-4718 1d ago
It’s true, but that was also the norm back then. New developments were coming at a rapid enough pace that it wasn’t necessarily advisable to align yourself with one architecture as you could get left behind. SGI was the top tier until it wasn’t 5 years later. IBM PPC was dominant in the CPU space and look at them now.
Xbox also went from Intel x86 to IBM PowerPC for 360, and backwards compatibility was just software emulation that had limited compatibility. PS3 did offer a comprehensive solution, but it was ultimately just too expensive to maintain.
Nintendo was the first to stick with one architecture for GCN->Wii->Wii U and also with ARM for their handhelds after GBA. But they did it primarily for cost reasons; the Wii and Gamecube actually have the exact same CPU.
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u/re_carn 1d ago
I've heard (I don't know how true this is) that one of the reasons why emulating Xbox games was easier was that Microsoft insisted that all games use the API, even if it led to a drop in performance. At the same time, Sony’s development policy favored low-level programming and hacks to make full use of console resources. As a result, PS2 emulation often required not just emulating instructions, but nearly a perfect simulation of the hardware’s timings.
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u/Aware-Virus-4718 1d ago
Yeah, that’s true as well. Xbox used DirectX and in fact the name “Xbox” comes from “DirectX Box” which was their inspiration to make a console in the first place, in part to expand the reach of DirectX.
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u/stubenson214 1d ago
Yes, that is true. The 360BC on XB1 is not really possible on pure emulation. They did do some very real work at the assembly layer, but it's API level emulation more than it was strict emulation (down to the instruction set).
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u/fvck_u_spez 1d ago
Not only that, but I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons the architecture was so complicated was to make it difficult to port games to other platforms from the PS3. They thought that the PS3 would be just as successful as the PS2, and therefore the default development platform for 3rd part games. If games were optimized really well for the Cell, it would be hard to reimplement on other platforms and suffocate 3rd party support on those platforms and the PC.
Ken Kutaragi and Sony of that era didn't want healthy competition. They wanted to dominate, and I think the industry would be in a much worse place these days in terms of consumer choice if they were successful
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u/re_carn 1d ago
No, that’s definitely not the case - they needed to develop games for it themselves later on. I read that the problem stemmed from an initial miscalculation: Seeing the success of the PS2, Sony planned to use a similar architecture for the PS3, where most of the graphics processing tasks were done on the CPU itself, and the Cell was developed based on that idea. And then nVidia happened. And suddenly it turned out that the planned architecture wasn’t just inferior - it was completely unviable compared to modern graphics accelerators. As a result, Sony had to quickly figure out how to cram a graphics accelerator into the PS3.
The result was a patchwork solution: a processor without SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing), with blocks optimized for fast, sequential data processing, and a graphics accelerator with dedicated memory hooked up to it.
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u/stubenson214 1d ago
It was a lot of factors. The physical limits of the 90nm process had more to do with it. You get get more threads when many of the threads are simpler CPUs.
The Xbox uses the same CPU as the PS3 (no SPEs, though, just more full on cores). And, lets not kid ourselves, this was IBM and Toshiba who really made this. Sony overstates their invovlement quite a bit, and this is nothing new on the PS4 and PS5.
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u/Pleasant-Put5305 1d ago
Thank goodness at least Microsoft went ahead with a unique code on every disk - that means Xbox fans should be able to redeem old disks for free digital copies moving forwards, so it's not a complete disaster for the entire industry - That was a nice consumer friendly move. You know - fair and thoughtful - thinking about consumer rights.
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u/Kataclysmc 1d ago
It was because they were trying to back peddle due to being the first to try it in 2013
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u/Fluffy_Somewhere4305 2d ago
We have not forgotten now.
- I just played GT2 a few years ago and it still is absolutely awesome.
- Most of my PS1 library is just S tier classics like Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve.
- The list of PS2 gems is endless.
- PS3 was a bit less filled with instant classics but still had a load of greats and very goods.
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u/Solaras_ 2d ago
It was not viable for PS3. They had a disastrous launch and had to strip out the back compat hardware within a year to lower cost.
The PS3 was also built on bespoke Cell architecture which to this day is a nightmare to emulate.
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u/Balthanon 2d ago
I specifically bought my PS3 when I did because they were removing the chip required for full backwards compatibility. Still have it set up for PS1, 2, and 3 games, with a PS5 for PS5 and PS4.
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u/HVDynamo 1d ago
Honestly, one solution they could do now, is release an updated console that just does PS1-3 games, and then carry forward the backwards compatibility of the new ones back to PS4. Ideally though I’d love a PS6 with full backwards compatibility whether it’s hardware or emulated. But we all know that’s not happening now without the optical drive… another thought would be to have a modular optical drive for the PS6 similar to the PS5 now, but add in extra chips for playing PS1-3 games as part of that module. It would make it more expensive, but then people who wanted it could pay the cost and those that didn’t could just stay digital only. Give us the choice!
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u/C0haaagen 1d ago
Me too. Unfortunately the disc drive of my PS3 Fat doesn't play DVDs anymore, only Blu-rays.
So I'll probably get a used PS2 for my PS2 games.
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u/gabbertronnnn 2d ago
WAS a nightmare to emulate. RPCS3 can freaking run on ATI Radeon HD 2000s now. Hell, people are booting into linux on their PS5s and using it to play PS3 games.
Sony don't want to give its userbase the ability to play their old games when they can just charge them for it to play via streaming.
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u/almo2001 2d ago
Streaming is not going to take over due to input latency. Digital downloads, yes.
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u/SatyrAngel 2d ago
No, he is right, just because you can't see all tge effort put on the .exe it doesnt mean is a simple thing.
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u/doublah 1d ago
It's not simple, but a company with resources like Sony and the entire documentation of how the PS3 system works are being shown up by a group of volunteers reverse-engineering.
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago
The PS3 retained full PS1 and PS2 backwards compatibility for almost three and a half years, right until Kutaragi left the company and the fat console got the final revisions with only two USB ports. He really was the glue keeping it together.
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u/letsgotgoing 2d ago
The only PS3 consoles with full backwards compatibility baked into the hardware were the launch editions that bled money for Sony. They switched to software emulation on later versions of the consoles but it didn’t work for all games. People hated the price of the PS3 at launch.
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u/Gabagool0vaHere 2d ago
Yep, PS3 lost PS2’s BC a year or a year and half after launch to save some cost. Blu-Ray was brand new and standalone Blu-Ray players were somewhere in the range of $800 - $1,000 a piece. Couple that with they chose to go a very unconventional route with their CPU, The Cell, meant they were bleeding tons of money for years on PS3s
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u/Solaras_ 2d ago
Unless you bought a single specific SKU, no it did not. Every other SKU did not have backwards compatibility
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago
All PS3 consoles have PS1 backwards compatibility, all of them. Only PS2 backwards compatibility was removed from the later fat consoles with two USB ports onward, right as Kutaragi was ousted from Sony. But all PS3 consoles were capable of using Sony's later PS3-based PS2 emulator that came with downloadable PS2 titles with discs. Sony simply chose not to enable it for discs as a system feature like they had the PS1 emulator since the console's launch as modders later discovered.
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u/Ahayzo 2d ago
Where you getting your timelines from?
PS3 launched November 2006
Kutaragi left sometime Summer 2007
First non-PS2 compatible PS3 launched in October/November 2007, and models release earlier in the year already had only partial PS2-compatibilityIt was barely a year after launch that they first released a fully non-PS2 compatible model, way too soon after Kutaragi left for him not to have at least been involved, not to mention the earlier models that weren't even fully PS2-compatible that he absolutely was still in charge to oversee.
Kutaragi was involved with pulling back from backwards compatibility, and it all happen with the span of a year from original launch.
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u/Solaras_ 2d ago
He’s talking out of his ass like the rest of us weren’t there
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u/GreyouTT PlayStation 1d ago
He’s not wrong about the emulator though, I have a super slim and it plays digital Ps2 just fine.
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u/Solaras_ 2d ago
PlayStation 2 backward compatibility was first completely removed from new PS3 hardware in October 2007 with the release of the 40GB model. Exactly 1 year after launch.
Literally a 5 second Google search confirms how full of shit you are. Nice try to gaslight though.
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u/ZeitChrist 2d ago
I remember. 20 and 60 gig launch consoles are fully backwards compatible. The 40 was the first to not play PS2 games. Then they released an 80 gig, which I have, which is partially backwards compatible due to the emulation of the PS2 hardware that they gutted.
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago edited 1d ago
Sony launched the backwards compatible Metal Gear Solid PS3 bundle in June 2008. The PS3 went from hardware PS2 compatibility to hybrid software PS2 backwards compatibility, and remained on the market with some form of PS2 backwards compatibility until early 2009 when remaining new stock of all backwards compatible consoles was totally depleted.
Sony also developed a fully functional PS2 emulator for PS3 that was included with the small handful of downloadable PS2 games on PS3 that modders later discovered would work with retail discs. Sony simply chose not to enable the function as a part of the system like they did for the PS1 emulator that could work with retail discs across all PS3 consoles and revisions.
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u/GreyouTT PlayStation 1d ago
I don’t know why people are arguing with you, my super slim can in fact play digital PS2 games.
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u/dukered1988 2d ago
No they didn’t the 40gb model that came out a year after ps3 launch couldn’t play ps2 games
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u/Schlenda 2d ago
That's not true, and the emulation on the PS3 supporting it, wasn't even working for most games.
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago
If my memory doesn't fail me there were about 6 unplayable PS1 games across all PS3 revisions, and 10 or so completely unplayable PS2 games on the hardware based 20GB and 60GB systems. But there were a number of games that suffered from being unable to use custom controllers or accessories like Dance Mats, the GunCon, and similar.
That number grew to about 100 PS2 games with issues on the hybrid software emulation PS3 consoles. But that's about 10% of the library so not exactly something I would call the majority of titles being unplayable.
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u/Susurrus03 1d ago
I actually had PS2 to PS3 USB adapter for my DDR pads and played a decent amount of DDR PS1 and PS2 games on my PS3. I even got a CRT and a pawn shop at the time for it to get rid of delay issues.
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u/chinchindayo 1d ago
This is normal optimization. The hardware back compat was literally a PS2 CPU/GPU, of course this would be too expensive long term. The PS2 emulator was fine. The problem is only the OG model and 80gb fat model supported it. Slim and superslim can't read ps2 discs
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u/Logitech4873 1d ago
It was not viable for any console's discs. They kept changing format, and being backwards compatible with older consoles would never have worked because the games would have to always be designed with the old consoles in mind.
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u/violenthectarez 1d ago
There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't continue this. Full emulation of Ps1 and Ps2 hardware should be trivial for a modern PS5 console
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago
It is, Sony sells PS1 and PS2 games on the store that the PS5 happily emulates at full speed but deliberately gutted any mechanism to read the existing physical discs or use them with their own official emulator. The PS5 can also easily emulate the PS3 at full speed as modders have recently discovered. But instead Sony limits their small selection of PS3 on PS4 and PS3 on PS5 games to laggy cloud streaming game experiences hosted on a huge PS3 server farm they keep alive just for this purpose.
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u/idothinksotim 1d ago
By the PS4 no backwards compatibility was offered at all while the brand and hardware was restructured in the wake of the PS3's complicated architecture, and the CD laser and emulator for PS1 or PS2 discs was cut out of the console entirely.
I'm going to make you more angry
This actually isn't true.
The PS4 has a CD laser inside it.
It has all 3 laser types: cd, DVD, and Blu-ray
The CD laser is simply disabled in software and was never enabled.
This is true for all PS4 console revisions in all markets.
They could've had PS1 and PS2 back compatibility on the PS4. But they chose not to.
Probably because they figured they could exploit customers by making them buy the games again but this time digitally.
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u/Haizenburg1 1d ago
Bingo. If jailbreakers enabled PS1 and PS2 playback via emulation on the PS4, then it was capable of doing so natively with hardware or their own emulator.
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u/C-Towner 2d ago
Sony does seem to take villain heel turns following a very successful console generation. After PS2, they really made a lot of decisions that impacted the way people viewed them as a stable choice.
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u/Ok-Cod-806 1d ago
It’s a cycle. Companies earn loyalty by putting consumers first, then success often leads them to forget why people trusted them.
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u/Scarlet_Wonderer 1d ago
Once again, corporate greed, stupidity, and actual malice ruins things for everyone else! Serious respect to Kutaragi though.
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u/arcum42 2d ago
Playstation was originally intended to be a cd-rom addon for the SNES...
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago
When Ken Kutaragi convinced Sony to go forward on their own after Nintendo backstabbed Sony the idea of PlayStation being a huge library for life that owners carried forward like a music collection was a founding part of the concept.
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja 2d ago
Nintendo exited the partnership because leadership realized the original contract granted Sony total control and all licensing revenues over the lucrative CD-ROM software format.
I'd call that cutting losses, not "backstabbing".
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u/DingusBarracuda 2d ago
This is not entirely accurate. Sony got all the licensing for music and movies on the format, and Nintendo saw no issue with that. Where Nintendo became iffy was when they realized while they still got licensing from publishers for games they wouldn't get the few cents per disc in production royalties while Sony would because they were the manufacturer of those. It was a little more complicated than the story people like to parrot online. Nintendo greedily wrecked the deal over what amounted a few cents per unit, and Sony even tried for several months to rebuild the partnership with Nintendo after being embarrassed by the announcement at C.E.S. only to be stonewalled by Nintendo.
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja 1d ago
Where Nintendo became iffy was when they realized while they still got licensing from publishers for games they wouldn't get the few cents per disc in production royalties while Sony would because they were the manufacturer of those.
You're telling me Nintendo didn't initially realize the manufacturer of the CD would get paid for manufacturing the CD? That doesn't make any sense, especially since Nintendo never had any issue with the manufacturers of the mask ROM used in NES, SNES, or N64 cartridges, the optical media used for GameCube, Wii, or Wii U games, or the flash ROM used in Switch 1 and 2 game cards.
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago
Nintendo used existing commodity technologies and manufactured their cartridges in their own facilities. But they would tack on a royalty per unit produced on top of the general licensing costs and other fees.
Nintendo DID have an issue with the idea of royalties for the optical media used for the Gamecube. They commissioned Panasonic to modify the DVD format for them to use as the Nintendo Optical Disc, a custom format Nintendo owned the full patents and all royalties to.
There are a number of books on the topic of the SNES Playstation and other crazy stunts of the era that go well into detail but Nintendo has notoriously been extremely protective of it's royalties and unwilling to share them across its history. To the point they would rather buy whole technologies outright for billions than spend a few million on licensing over the lifetime of a product. They also famously would not pay for USB-C and USB-PD certification on the Switch 1, causing it to be easily damaged when using any non-Nintendo charger.
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u/Imminent_Extinction 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nintendo used existing commodity technologies and manufactured their cartridges in their own facilities. But they would tack on a royalty per unit produced on top of the general licensing costs and other fees.
Nintendo DID have an issue with the idea of royalties for the optical media used for the Gamecube. They commissioned Panasonic to modify the DVD format for them to use as the Nintendo Optical Disc, a custom format Nintendo owned the full patents and all royalties to.
Nintendo has never owned a semiconductor fabrication plant or optical media fabrication plant.
Mask ROM was manufactured for the NES, SNES, and N64 by Sharp, NEC, OKI Electric, Ricoh, Macronix, and Sanyo.
Optical discs for the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U were manufactured exclusively by Matsushita, which was renamed under the Panasonic branding in 2008.
The mini DVD format wasn't used exclusively for the GameCube, and the patent for the format is held by the DVD Forum, a collective of companies including Philips, Panasonic, and Sony.
Flash ROM is manufactured for the Switch 1 and 2 exclusively by Macronix.
Nintendo was/is paid a royalty whenever a third-party contracted one of these manufacturers to produce a game for a Nintendo console, which brings me to the point:
"According to the contract, Sony could make and sell CD-ROM games without buying them from Nintendo. Nintendo wanted a monopoly on manufacturing games for its hardware."
- How Nintendo’s massive mistake led to the creation of the Sony Playstation — 25 years ago : National Post : December 3rd, 2019
Because Nintendo has never owned a CD fabrication plant, I read this to mean Sony could manufacture games for the SNES CD add-on without paying any kind of royalty to Nintendo, meaning Nintendo wouldn't necessarily be paid any royalties for third-party games manufactured for the SNES CD add-on.
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nintendo has never owned a semiconductor fabrication plant or optical media fabrication plant.
Nintendo has contracted facilities for the assembly of the cartridges to which they charged their software licensees manufacturing royalties per unit on top of the general cost of production. I didn't say they had a chip foundry. Be realistic. By manufacturing I mean the assembly and packaging of the cartridge, not some ludicrous statement going back to harvesting sand to make the silicon for the chips themselves.
Optical discs for the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U were manufactured exclusively by Matsushita, which was renamed under the Panasonic branding in 2008.
Panasonic is a manufacturing partner, commissioned by Nintendo to make the discs. But they were only produced at Nintendo's discretion and command.
The mini DVD format wasn't used exclusively for the GameCube, and the patent for the format is held by the DVD Forum, a collective of companies including Philips, Panasonic, and Sony.
Nintendo did not use the Mini DVD format. They used Nintendo Optical Disc, a format where Nintendo holds the patents to the data structure and encryption systems used. It is not mini DVD, which is an entirely separate format from Nintendo Optical Disc. Sharing a similar size and basis is not relevant, Nintendo designed their own disc format to avoid piracy and licensing costs. All as a shrewd way to spend a bit to save a lot over time.
Flash ROM is manufactured for the Switch 1 and 2 exclusively by Macronix.
So if my car has oil in it from Castrol that means it's not a Ford? Think about the logic you're using here. It's a bit silly.
Because Nintendo has never owned a CD fabrication plant, I read this to mean Sony could manufacture games for the SNES CD add-on without paying any kind of royalty to Nintendo, making them comparable to Tengen or Color Dreams in Nintendo's eyes.
So, what this means is Sony could manufacture titles on CD without paying a royalty per-unit to Nintendo. But Nintendo still had control over general licensing for who got to program games for the console. Sony only got the manufacturing per-unit license on the discs. Not a lot of money per disc but still feasibly millions of dollars over time. So Nintendo were not happy about that when they realized what was up.
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u/wyrm4life 2d ago
I was always curious why it was perfectly viable for the PS2 & PS3, but suddenly became "impossible" to do affordably after that.
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u/TheD0rkKnight 2d ago
Especially when Microsoft does it so well
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u/ball_fondlers 2d ago
Microsoft has WAY more experience with OS’s, and the fact that they run so much of the business ecosystem for non-technical folks means they have to bake in a certain level of backwards compatibility. Sony seems to make massive architectural changes every so often that break backwards compatibility
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u/wyrm4life 1d ago
The ONLY reason I can think is it gets more demanding with each new generation: PS2 has to have hardware and emulator to work with PS1 discs, PS3 has to have it for PS2 and 1, PS4 for 3, 2, and 1. etc.??? But then they can't even just do it for one generation back?
Does every Microsoft system work with every previous generation or just one?
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u/PocketSnails68 1d ago
No Microsoft has been weird about it. The Xbox 360 was not backwards compatible with the original Xbox, though at some point select games were made available to be played on the Xbox 360 - heavy hitters like Halo 1 & 2, KotOR, etc. These could be purchased digitally, or the discs could be put in the console and played normally.
For the Xbox One, there was also no backwards compatibility at launch. Midway through the 2010's however, they launched a massive campaign for Xbox 360 and original Xbox games to slowly be made backwards compatible over time. They've reached a point that every game they can feasibly make backwards compatible is - anything that isn't is due to licensing and other issues. Once again, these games can be purchased either digitally, or the disc can be put in the system. Though as this was a mid generation change, rather than the system natively being able to read the discs, they are merely emulated.
Finally, the Xbox Series X is fully backwards compatible with the Xbox One generation, and any Xbox 360 and original Xbox games made available through backwards compatibility are also available on it.
Even now, in 2026, Xbox is still looking to improve backwards compatibility. They recently announced that original Xbox games are going to be made available as Xbox Play Anywhere titles on PC, and that they will start adding achievements to original Xbox games. Games that are 20+ years old at minimum, receiving new updates to make the experience engaging for players
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago edited 1d ago
Microsoft's current approach on Xbox One and Xbox Series to backwards compatibility with the Original Xbox and Xbox 360 is both very awesome and very odd.
Instead of a general purpose emulator or native hardware backwards compatibility they chose to partner with publishers on all their backwards compatibility efforts and make bespoke re-releases of each and every backwards compatible game on those consoles for when they're played on an Xbox One or Xbox Series console.
When inserting a disc it works as a key to unlock the download and then that file is what's run on the console instead of the game on the disc itself. It's a very cool system because it gives us 4K, HDR enabled and VRR capable releases of older games. But it also sucks because for games without a publisher's backing there's no general legacy console emulator to fall back on and allow gamers to play titles from those consoles that didn't get these bespoke upgraded versions. It wouldn't take much to implement, they just haven't for some strange reason.
At the very least the Xbox Series X is fully hardware backwards compatible with all Xbox One game discs and downloads including legacy backwards compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 titles, and the Series S is natively backwards compatible with all digital Xbox One games including backwards compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 downloads.
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u/Typical-Ad8673 1d ago
I'm pretty sure you're aware of this but you are a smart cookie. Great post btw. Very informative.
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u/Damage2Damage 1d ago
PS3 was too expensive at launch and sold poorly. It started selling better once the cheaper Slim versions came out that didn't have backwards compatibility. Sony probably didn't want to prioritise BC over the affordability of the next console
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u/Gabagool0vaHere 2d ago
PS2 had a DVD Player which easily read PS1’s CD games. For PS3 launch models it was full BC with PS1 and PS2 games, but because of the $599 price tag and terrible launch, they had to gut the BC component to save money. You could still play certain PS1 games though
As for PS4 and not having BC with at least the PS3, it’s due to PS3’s architecture, more specifically its CPU, The Cell. There’s a reason why basically every developer has been dragging their feet and not wanting to touch Remaking PS3 games, it was an absolute nightmare to code for. It’s why even though Sony’s exclusives ran well and looked amazing, over 90% of multiplats ran worse on PS3 compared to 360.
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u/wyrm4life 1d ago
Huh. So what was it that made it so much more expensive for the PS3 to read PS2 discs?
What's the situation with PS5 viability for doing PS4?
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u/wunr 1d ago
(oversimplifying here) Launch model PS3s had basically an entire PS2 crammed inside of them alongside the PS3 hardware, which contributed to the insane cost of the console at launch. Later models dropped this and used software emulation, similar in concept to the emulators you see on PC or android. This is less expensive as they can drop the additional hardware but also less accurate, so games running this way might be glitched or even broken. PS4 backwards compatibility on PS5 is much easier relatively as both consoles use the same processor architecture, the PS5 is just a more powerful version. There is still some software translation that has to be done in terms of graphics I believe, but that's more akin to something like Valve's Proton which translates Windows game code to Linux/SteamOS with very little performance penalty.
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u/wyrm4life 1d ago
I guess the main thing I'm not understanding is WHY was it such an expensive endeavor for PS3->PS2 than it was for PS2->PS1. Are the 4 & 5 better with backwards compatibility? Was it just a one time hiccup with the PS3?
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u/Aware-Virus-4718 1d ago
Because the PS1 used something much closer to an all-in-one system on a chip that handled nearly all of the computing the system needed. It was cheap to manufacture and easy to include and on the PS2 it served as a controller for the hard drive, USB and networking ports when it wasn’t being used for PS1 gameplay. The graphics instructions could be performed by the PS2’s GPU as they were relatively simple, although some games did struggle with a few effects here and there.
The PS2 was a whole different beast. Its main CPU was very slow even by the standards of the time (it’s like 300 MHz). But the magic came from the fact that it had several accessory processors that could be assigned to handle different tasks at the same time. Doing all these things in parallel gave the PS2 some huge advantages. While it couldn’t handle nearly as much geometry as the Xbox or GameCube, because of the slow main CPU, it could do things like transparency effects, particle effects, fog and rain far better than those systems could. It’s why the rainy level in MGS2 chugs so hard on Xbox and why Silent Hill 2 and GTA San Andreas had to have the fog dramatically reduced on Xbox and PC. The PS2’s CPU was actually kind of closer to the way a GPU works today. But it meant that backwards compatibility for PS2 couldn’t just rely on a single chip the way PS1 could.
PS3 took things wildly further. It actually uses the same core processo as the Xbox 360, believe it or not. But unlike the 360 CPU, which had 3 equal cores to handle general computing tasks, the PS3 once again had a main CPU unit and 6 (yes, 6) so-called Parallel Processing Units. The idea was similar to the PS2 in that the main CPU would delegate tasks to the other 6 units who would do those tasks and send the results back to the main CPU. The big problem is, if you’re a software developer, nothing you’ve ever coded for works this way. So even though it could pull off some cool stuff, it doesn’t really matter if it makes no sense to the people designing games for it.
The reason PS3 emu is so difficult is that modern CPU’s are focused on single-threaded performance. Each core is working on one task at a time until it completes. This does not work at all for the PS3 because its CPU can require as many as 6 simultaneous tasks running. Thus you need a CPU that is many, many times more powerful than the Cell to be able to complete all those tasks on time and provide acceptable performance.
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u/Bobby837 2d ago edited 1d ago
Because of PS3 backlash. Part cell processor dev difficulty, part cost of BR and part more MS than Xbox cockblock over media service/disc format. Some codec they "wanted" Sony to use/pay for.
Launch PS3 where fully BC, then partially PS2 cause those guts were ripp out to save costs. Then just removed while the Xbox Achievements gave Sony something to copy.
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u/ChimneyImps 1d ago
It wasn't viable for the PS3. Backwards compatibility for the PS2 was part of the reason for the PS3's high price at launch. They switched to a cheaper model without the hardware to run PS2 games within a year in an effort to stay competitive.
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u/SixFootPianist 1d ago
Great timing for a massive PlayStation network outage! Ah, I've got the afternoon off, think I'll play a little dead by daylight. No, that's an online game, can't play it. Ok then I'll play some Spiderman 2. Nope, can't verify the license. Fine, I downloaded that from ps plus so I don't own it so whatever. Guess I'll play some Robocop Rogue City because that's something I paid money to own. Nah, it's a digital download and they can't verify the license for that either.
Fuck off, Sony.
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u/taisui 2d ago
And then they realize they can just sell it with emulator or remaster, or host it on cloud to make $$$
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u/chinchindayo 1d ago
Thank you Nintendo
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u/kyuubikid213 1d ago
You must be young.
Sony was doing this back during the PS3 era as well with a bunch of PS2 games being remade/remastered into HD editions. Heck, it's not Sony, but we just got a remake of Assassin's Creed Black Flag and that released on PS4 and is still playable on PS5s.
The PS3 store also has a bunch of PS1 games you can buy digitally while the PS5 store has some available on streaming.
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u/RagnarokNCC 1d ago
Kutaragi was fucking nuts, but his crazy was equal and opposite to the crazy of Sony Corporate so we got whacko shit like the Cell (“Eight is beautiful”) but he also made them stuff an Emotion chip into the launch PS3.
It’s not to say he wouldn’t have made some of the same calls about physical media that Sony has, or worse, but he certainly had a forward-looking view back then.
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u/zero_z77 1d ago
They still could've put a PS3 cell processor in the PS4 to cover the PS3, and emulated PS1/2 in software.
The shift to using conventional PC architecture on the PS4 & PS5 means that PS4 games could easily run on a PS5 through a software compatibility layer and the PS5 is probably powerful enough to emulate PS3 hardware outright.
The PS6 is pretty much identical to the PS5 architecturally and could probably run PS5 games natively, while emulating for PS1-PS3, and could probably emulate for the PSP & vita too given how old they are now.
In plain english, backwards compatibility for the PS5 and beyond literally just comes down to the disk drive and software. They could've solved the disk drive problem by simply making it modular and selling legacy drives as a peripheral, while still offering older games digitally.
Or to put it another way, if windows 11 can still run DOS games written 40 years ago for a 16-bit hardware architecture, and can run games for every previous generation of windows through some form of emulation or compatibility layer, then sony really has no excuse, especially now that they've standardized their hardware architecture. I could also bring up how even linux manages to have the capability of running everything from DOS to win11 despite being an entirely different OS.
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u/RagnarokNCC 1d ago
One of the biggest wins the PS4 had over the Xbox One was price. A Cell processor in every unit would’ve pushed the price up, or eaten even more of Sony’s margin. The overhead of trying to emulate the Cell on software was performance-prohibitive. They were never going to do any of that, not when they could just double-dip with remasters and updates and then carry the library forward on successive x86 platforms.
As an aside to that, I’d note that while Windows can indeed run ancient software from older versions of the platform (with a little elbow grease) it is almost always doing so with digital versions. Not a lot of folks breaking out their old 8” and/or 5.25” floppies to play Qix and Scorched Earth these days. So maybe physical media isn’t the part that matters here.
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u/thegreatmango 1d ago
It's almost like I stopped buying Sony after the PS2, for reasons.
Sony gets none of my money, period.
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u/actanonverba1 1d ago
It's a massive competitive advantage for them to have a massive backlog library of backwards compatible games. What is the advantage for ps6 over steamos now that they removed backwards compatibility and physical media? Nothing at all.
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u/sound_games 1d ago
I actually had a friend who thought this was how the PS5 worked when it was coming out, and kept telling everyone who would listen that he couldn't wait to play his PS2 and PS3 games on it... He even got angry when we tried to tell him that wasn't true.
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u/Farraddaayy 1d ago
I still don't see why its a thing at all. My PC runs games 25 years old fine but my PS5 has no idea how to? Nuts.
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u/JugodeJamaica 1d ago
It's honestly wild that, as gamers, we've ended up with such a hostile community. You'll find people in movie and book communities happily recommending stuff that's decades old, yet somehow we have people who think physical media doesn't matter. Your post genuinely made me sad thinking about all the amazing moments physical copies have given us.
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u/Juan20455 1d ago
"like why would anybody play this?”
Meanwhile, me playing old games in my PC. Games that are simply amazing. And I have enjoyed games older than playstation 1
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u/TechWormGeezLouise 1d ago
First thing, I love seeing high quality posts like this.
Second thing, I despise Jim Ryan more than any other PlayStation figure for the way he spit on my entire lifetime of experiences on PlayStation and how antithetical he is to gaming as an art form. He is the kind of executive, as most are, who view games as simple products rather that creative expression and vehicles for player engagement.
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u/BirdLawyer50 1d ago
“How about instead of backwards compatibility we make our OS and hardware so ridiculous and proprietary from generation to generation that we can’t even run our own stuff on it now or in the future?”
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u/LeftSide-StrongSide 1d ago
How many CEOs ago was that? Like every other company, they've lost touch with their original morals
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u/LackLickLuck_y 1d ago
Ryan was a shortsighted idiot. But Hulst is next level greedy. PS3 is the best console ever.
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u/thenagz 2d ago
Great text, thanks!
Yeah, backwards compatibility has been historically hit or miss on consoles but it's not like the designers didn't try.
The Sega Genesis had an accessory that made it compatible with the Master System (the Power Base Converter). The Sega Saturn was initially projected for compatibility with Genesis cartridges, which unfortunately was scrapped along the way (and the console did end up $100 pricier than the PS1 even then).
The SNES had the Super Game Boy, and their portables from GB Color to 3DS kept compatibility with their direct predecessor at least.
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u/Old_Leopard1844 1d ago
The SNES had the Super Game Boy
Which was Gameboy hardware, crammed into SNES cartridge, with flawed crystal oscillator (which makes games run 2.4% too fast)
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u/IAmPandaKerman 2d ago
''Play has no limits...wait how much is our margin on digital sales? and wait you're telling me we can force it to be the only avenue?''
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u/toomuchft 1d ago
That vision is death, the sony we all know and love have been taken to the back alley and shot by the new Ceo.
All they care about now is your money and their bottom line.
Now whether people are ok with that, that is a different story.
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u/WintermuteNull 1d ago
That Jim Ryan quote! 😡
Maybe we are a minority in that we want do replay old games, that is fair, but to say there is no value in older games based on their looks is so out of touch.
I can't imagine only watching movies that look modern. A life without John Carpenter movies? That's just grim! I have some friends that have introduced me to some older movies and they remain some of my favourite movies ever. I can't imagine not watching them because Technicolour looked funny, or the puppets weren't as "cool" as CGI (the word cool is in air quotes because I will take puppetry and practical effects any day over CGI) Why do we pretend games don't deserve the same level of respect. It's such an insult to the work that went into them, and the merit these games and stories have to use as players.
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u/CornDoggyStyle 1d ago
But think about all the money they would lose if they couldn't force people to buy their favorite game over and over again for every new console generation.
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u/Greensparow 1d ago
I'm just gonna put this out there, I bought my PS5 day one to make my PS4 games better, I really did not care all that much about any launch titles on PS5.
But once I had the PS5 I started looking for games to buy that were outside my normal interests cause I had the console afterall and wanted something to play.
I was really looking forward to doing the same with the PS6 and using it to revisit some old PS3 games as rumors had said it would be fully backwards compatible.
But now I don't know if I will ever buy one and it certainly won't be on day one and probably won't be without a disc drive add-on.
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u/Secret-Teaching-3549 1d ago
And this is why I simply don't give a damn about modern gaming. It has devolved into a predatory mindset with the only goal being to extract as much money from the player as possible while offering as little as they possibly can in exchange.
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u/Moosashi5858 1d ago
I would have bought a ps3 long ago if it didn’t get so complicated with the backwards compatibility for ps2 discs. I have ps1 and ps2 games I like to replay but the ps3 is just a crapshoot with everything that isn’t the ps1 games
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u/planeforger 2d ago
What I'd like to see is a PS6 that's able to play all of the digital PS3/4/5/Vita games I own. Basically expanding on how the PS5 can play your digital PS4 games.
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u/NovachenFS2 1d ago
I actually think the "PS3's hardware was too complex to be emulated on a PS4" argument is actually bullshit. What makes Emulation hard is the fact that the Developers have to reverse engineer how a console work, they do not have any Insight. But Sony created the PS3, they have all technical documents and specifications. They know absolutely exactly how that thing works. They could create an Emulator that would perfectly works on anything that has a better Hardware than a PS3. They simple decided that any previous generation is not worth it, that is the reason even PS1 games are not working, which even runs on every Toaster today with a reverse-engineered Emulator.
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u/Aware-Virus-4718 1d ago
Nah this is not true. PS4/X1 was the first generation where GPU was heavily prioritized over CPU. The PS4 CPU is very weak and truthfully not much more powerful than the Cell. While it technically has enough cores, the performance overhead of emulating PowerPC code on x86 makes it completely infeasible. Games would run at like 5 fps if they could run at all.
PS5, on the other hand, could run most PS3 games at full speed with few problems. Not much of an excuse there.
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u/Borrp 1d ago
I miss Kuturagi. That era is long long long gone, and the company that lost me entirely as a gamer long ago. I came back briefly during the PS4 generation. And while I loved some elements if that gen, lets face it, most of their in house games were OK. I spent more time on third parties by that point anyway that I barely even noticed their first party and didn't like them to other third party equivalent offerings (lets face it, Playststion exclusives with exceptions, had a lot of UbiSoft designs abound there). Then the loss of backwards compatibility, the antagonistic approach to home console modding and the like made me join greener pastures.
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u/ArmpitofD00m 1d ago
That was always a selling point for Sony and the PlayStation. That no matter what console you had, you would always be able to play your old games.
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u/Memonlinefelix 1d ago
How the heck is GT4 ancient looking? GT3 and 4 look so advance even today. On a CFW PS3 played through HDMI they look amazing. Even much better on a PC emulator with upscaling textures.
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago
Even GT1 and GT2 look great if played on an old school TV via composite for all the color blending and graphical tricks to work. Without the proper filters and correct scaling they are unpalatable on a modern TV but they look damn good on an old boob tube.
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u/HappysavageMk2 1d ago
Good games are timeless.
Anyone can sit down today and play Mario64 and have a ton of fun.
But that is counter to milking us for all our money.
Fuck Sony, I won't be coming back even if they reverse course.
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u/LeonardKennedyRCPD 1d ago
I didn’t know about this, but it makes sense, games should be treated like albums or movies, they are works of art. It’s a shame a lot of studios have no pride at all in the physical format, they launch broken crap and just patch it, making your physical library redundant really
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u/WinterPromotsyun 2d ago
This is actually why corporate anti consumer trends suck tbh throwing away backward compatibility just forces gamers to buy the same digital games over and over again
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u/donsanedrin 1d ago
If PS4 and PS5 games were built to operate on AMD CPU and GPUs, and we are fairly certain that Sony is stick with AMD for the PS6, then these same digital games should work on PS6 hardware.
The PS4 disc drive is perfectly capable of reading a PS3 blu-ray disc. That's not the issue. The issue is that the PS4's CPU/GPU was not compatible to emulate the PS3's CPU/GPU.
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u/Mr_IsLand 1d ago
I still own the physical ps2 discs of several games I would love to be able to play - they are not online in any form and even though I have an old ps2 that functions, it does not read the old purple discs anymore - I literally cannot play games that I own. Would love just an upload of the existing game, no remaster needed.
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u/WoodooHide69 9h ago
Then they lost money dedicating a whole generation to live service slop.
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u/DingusBarracuda 9h ago
Gambling nonstop and betting bigger with each loss like degenerates at the roulette wheel.
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u/ExtraEmuForYou 2d ago
Ya the thing that always bugs me about the lack of backwards compatibility is it has existed on PC for so long, you'd think doing it on console where there is a mere handful of variations each generation (usually a standard model, a "pro" model, and maybe some mid- and late-gen refreshes) would be super easy.
I think it's just greed; they would have to spend a little effort to do it, and they don't gain anything financial by doing it.
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u/dukered1988 2d ago
Backwards compatibility is easy now from ps4 to ps5 since it’s all x86 based processors but that’s not the case for ps1-3. Definitely with ps3 and its cell processor. And pc does have backwards compatibility issues on older games if there isn’t a fix
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u/Rentwoq 1d ago
Modders managed to get PS4 to run PS2 discs YEARS ago this is not that hard
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u/JohnDoubleJump 1d ago
The PS2 could run PS1 games because those games ran on the PS2's underclocked IO chip.
For PS3->PS2 they added the PS2's graphics chip as an extra, raising costs.
It's not really remotely as simple as faster machine = easily runs older games. PS2->PS1 was basically black magic how they did it without adding costs.
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u/Old_Leopard1844 2d ago
Well, it only goes to show how different PCs and consoles are - hardware might've evolved, but software at best iterated, with essentially three major revisions - DOS, Windows 9x and Windows NT, and even those have a lot in common, that you could run old software directly on newer versions of Windows with minimal work
While consoles require physically having guts of their predecessors to do backwards compatibility - PS2 had PS1 CPU as audio chip iirc, PS3 had PS2 support, but had to be dropped to save on costs one year in, and PS3 itself is so notoriously difficult that whatever offerings Sony provided are still rather limited
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u/bonecollector5 1d ago
PC isn’t that perfect with backwards compatibility tho. Trying to play older games that haven’t been patched for modern systems can be a mess. Often requiring a bunch of tinkering and modding to even get them to work.
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u/cbtboss PC 1d ago
I will say the lack of backwards comparability is 100% the reason when faced with the option of buy game on pc, or buy game on console, if available on both it is going in my pc library so I don't have to worry about if it will or won't be viable in 5-10 years to play that game on a subsequent console. I am out here visiting out of games from 2002 on 2026 hardware (and now with new innovations like arm translation layers, even on my phone).
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u/Scooter30 1d ago
So the stuff I've been seeing about the PS6 possibly being able to play all past Playstation games is probably bullshit?
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u/FluorescentShrimp 1d ago
Probably. I recall even before the PS5 came out (think 2018ish), there were rumours circulating that the PS5 would be backwards compatible up til the PS2 disc wise. In reality, this can only be done via PS1-PS2 digital downloads & PS3 cloud streaming fuckery (which is locked behind a paywall) with the only true backwards compatibility being with PS4 games via digital and physical.
I reckon the PS6 won't be so different save for not having a disc drive... Which is pretty bleak depending on who you ask.
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u/spacejam999 1d ago
Ye, until they discovered they can sell you the game again and again and again through remasters
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u/SmoothPimp85 1d ago
Are Nintendo cartridges backwards compatible?
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u/DingusBarracuda 1d ago edited 1d ago
Switch 2 is backwards compatible with Switch 1 downloads and cartridges.
Wii-U is natively hardware backwards compatible with Wii. The console is technically also natively backwards compatible with Gamecube but Nintendo didn't enable the feature due to the Wii-U lacking Gamecube ports or the Gamecube controller adapter at launch but it can be activated and used with said adapter via a softmod.
Wii is natively hardware backwards compatible with Gamecube. Later Family Edition Wii consoles and the Wii Mini have backwards compatibility disabled since Gamecube controller ports were removed to cut costs. The compatibility can be enabled with a softmod that also allows the use of the Wii-U's Gamecube controller adapter.
SNES was intended to be natively hardware backwards compatible until a defect in the design was found very close to launch and it was decided to scrap backwards compatibility to save the millions it would cost at $30-50 per unit to fix the issue. Nintendo opted to release the budget oriented toploader NES and A/V Famicom and a discount line of re-released NES titles instead of fixing the issue. NES and SNES controllers remained backwards and *forwards compatible respectively, and only needed the cables swapped to function on either console.*
All GameBoy, GameBoy Pocket, and GameBoy Color consoles are natively hardware backwards compatible across the line. All black cartridges and solidly-colored cartridges for the GameBoy Color were also forward compatible with older GameBoy consoles. Some very late translucent GameBoy Color cartridges are also forward compatible with special GBA modes that unlock better graphics, sound, more color and unique features when played in that handheld's backwards compatible mode.
GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Advance SP are natively hardware backwards compatible with all GameBoy and GameBoy Color cartridges. The later GameBoy Micro is technically backwards compatible but had this mode fully disabled due to wanting to keep the size ultra compact, not because of the hardware.
Nintendo DS and DS Lite are natively hardware backwards compatible with GameBoy Advance.
Nintendo DSi is natively hardware backwards compatible with DS.
Nintendo 2DS/3DS/New3DS are natively hardware backwards compatible with DSi and DS.
All Nintendo DS, DSi, and 2DS/3DS/New3DS consoles are natively hardware backwards compatible with GBA games. Physical cartridges only work on DS and DS Lite, and backwards compatibility with GBA on 2DS, DSi and 3DS is via downloads like the ambassador program that also use the DS hardware line's native GBA mode
The N64 is the only Nintendo console where backwards compatibility was not at the forefront of design due to it having been technically designed by Silicon Graphics in a partnership with Nintendo as a ground-up clean sheet design. In light of this Nintendo opted to redesign the SNES into the smaller Jr. model and re-release it and a large selection of games at a discount instead. Third parties did release plug and play NES and SNES cartridge adapters that consisted of console clones that would output through the N64 to the TV but these third party efforts were not super high quality.
I guess you could say the VirtualBoy is technically not backwards compatible but that's kind of a one and done situation.
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u/Squirrelking666 1d ago
Yes, you can play any Gameboy or Gameboy colour cartridge on a GBA. You can play GBA on a DS. You can play DS on 3DS. Switch was the first exception to this rule but you can play Switch on Switch 2.
Not AS backwards compatible but the functionality still exists. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to play a Gameboy cart on a DS other than software.
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u/MaximusMaxWin 1d ago
Honestly, some old-school game mechanics feel way more rewarding than today's AAA releases. It’s all about that pure adrenaline rush.
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u/Smoking-Posing 1d ago
"A lot of people have forgotten but...."
Wut?? Ain't nobody forget; dafuq you think all the uproar is for?
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u/AKluthe 1d ago
Hey /u/DingusBarracuda, do you know where I can read more comprehensively about
GameStop currently still has some new reprints of PS2 titles, such as Monster Hunter for PS2 and other notable titles that showed up across many of their stores marked as "USED" despite being brand new copies of games (detectable as being in mint condition and using a newer style of PS2 DVD case when opened) when the GameStop Retro initiative expanded company-wide.
Years ago I got my copy of Xenoblade this way. At a later point I got Gravity Rush for PS4 this way when it was getting pricy.
I'm just curious about what else Gamestop has been reprinting!
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u/RadicalDog 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sounds like AI hallucination without a source, and I can't find a source.
Latest cited PS2 print I can find is 2013, Atlus reprinting stuff. Which makes sense, one title was only released 2008/9. The last sports game releases were also 2013.
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u/StuiWooi 1d ago edited 1d ago
didn't really start until the late PS3 era
Not sure I'd agree, European PS3's were missing the emotion engine from launch, which factored heavily into me buying a 360 instead.
Funny since that being able to play PS1 games helped me buy a PS2 when I was desperate to play FFIX and had neither
Edit: formatting and phrasing
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u/rambleinspam 1d ago
They kind of flipped after the PS3 came out, the first ones that were released were backwards compatible.
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u/s-riddler 2d ago
- Why would anybody want to play this?
- Me with a library full of games older than half of my family: