PlayStation 2 Backwards Compatibility Arriving On PlayStation 5

Backwards compatibility used to be something we’d be looking forward to when a new gaming console was about to come out. With time, this tradition started to become rather distant to players, leaving physical game owners in the shadows. For the people who wanted to try out the old games, it was either getting a secondhand console and game, which could be tricky thanks to its slowly disappearing demand, or the console makers allowing digital versions of them to be available, which leads to problems more than convenience nowadays.

While Microsoft handled the backwards compatibility well with their software, Nintendo started to become more and more annoying as it demanded more money from the users for simple, and sometimes even non-functional- ports of the games for an absurd amount of prices. In Sony, however, everything was fine up until the PS4 era when it included no backwards compatibility, and PS5 now only plays PS4 games, meaning there is no way a Playstation player could experience old titles without either emulation or buying the needed physical hardware and copies. PS3 at least played PS1 games with no problem and emulated some of the PS2 games and gave no trouble.

 

Sony is a bit restrictive when it comes to deciding which games can be played in which consoles. However, this idea might soon change as Implicit Conversions recently stepped into bringing some classics. Last month, PSPlus users received Resistance: Retribution, released for PSP, and a month before that, they received Rally Cross, which was a PlayStation exclusive released back in 1998. On their website, Implicit Conversions state they are working alongside Sony Interactive, therefore they could bring any game available in the console’s lifespan, maybe excluding some PS3 titles due to region differences of course.

The company explicitly doesn’t state which games and consoles they are working on bringing back to the PlayStation 5 platform right now, but it is speculated that at least one game from the PlayStation 2 era might get in, which begs the question if Sony is willing to update the disc drives to allow CD owners to enjoy the games on their latest console available. It was a bit tricky to get PS3s to allow PS2 games to be played, but we are talking about 15 years of tech difference, so it should be possible to play some old games we used to love and play on current hardware.

Nevertheless, it is still uncertain if we’ll ever see a PS5 play a PS2 game on an upscaled and HD resolution. Sony has nothing to lose with bringing classics back to the mainstream media, it would benefit both new and old gamers alike.

Atilla Turan (@burningarrow)
Editor, NoobFeed