The Incredible Failure That Is The PlayStation Classic

When the PlayStation Classic was announced in September 2018 I was pretty optimistic, as most of the internet seemed. The much-beloved PlayStation getting a “flashback” style console akin to what Nintendo did with the NES and SNES Classic Edition consoles seemed like a great idea. What could go wrong? The PlayStation had an amazing game library, so you take some of those top games, make a good little machine to emulate the console and boom, you have something that can’t go wrong, right?

Wrong.

That’s exactly what happened in what I can only describe as an incredible failure. Interestingly, from the very beginning, there seemed to be issues present, ones that only hinted at what was to come. Let’s start at the beginning…

The Power Supply Issue
I covered this in detail in not one but two articles, but the first controversy with the console was that the unit does not come with a power supply. This annoyed many when the console was first announced and while I still feel the issue of powering it isn’t too great of one, especially when compared to what’s to come in this list, it’s still one of those things where you just have to ask “why?” Why not give one?

The Games List
The list of games was the first sign that the console itself wasn’t going to be as great as people felt it would or could be. I’ve covered this as well, but suffice it to say while the selection wasn’t bad, it wasn’t that great either – a rather odd set of games that heavily divided the gaming scene with regards to this console — the focus is the games, after all, and if it doesn’t have much that you want, then why buy it? That of course was before the unit was released, and we learned even more about what could have been…

The Controllers
I would imagine much of this contention comes from people who are too young to remember the PlayStation launch (that was 24 years ago, after all)
but one of the major complaints people had following the announcement was that the console came with the original style PlayStation controllers, as opposed to Analog / Dual Shock styled controllers. To me this made sense — this is a console designed to match the original release, or at least, that’s the idea I got from it. This includes the original style controllers.

Of course, the games list is a bit more recent in some cases than I expected (which was going to be games from only the first 3 years of the consoles life) but still – this at least dictated no games that required dual analog (such as Ape Escape) which I was fine with. Capture the classic feel from 1995 to 1998, right?

Still, some people didn’t like this. Oh well.

The Emulator
This is where things get nasty. It was discovered a little before launch that the emulator being used is a branch of a mainstream, open source emulator called PCSX. Yep, that’s right, rather than use their own emulation system, they just took someone else’s and put it in a pretty generic piece of hardware. An emulator that isn’t even that great compared to other options, or the rather solid emulation systems Sony themselves had developed for the PSP and PlayStation 3.

When the first videos of the device were shown, the interface was regarded as lackluster, and the whole experience kind of poor, but at least the games worked, right? Right?! Oh, no…

PAL Games On The US Console
This, by far, was the “straw that broke the camels back” as they say. This was the single biggest issue found just before launch. The US version of the PlayStation classic has PAL versions for some of the games.

Without going into extreme detail, inferior versions of games like Tekken 3 were put on the console, rather than the US version. These games run slower than their US counterparts (for technical reasons related to television in PAL regions back in the analog TV era) and their inclusion makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

This is one of those things I can’t even begin to explain, and was yet another sign just before launch that this console was a rush job, and rendered some of the already hit or miss game library on the console debatably unplayable. 

The Emulator Options Menu Is Still Accessible Using A USB Keyboard!
Stepping back to the emulator itself for a moment, a discovery made not long after the console was released was that if you plugged in a USB keyboard there was a good chance it would work in the console, and by hitting the escape key you could access the menu system of the emulator being used, and could change all kinds of settings, many of which should have been in the system menu according to many owners of the console.

Of course, with this kind of accessibility, it was only a matter of time before the system was cracked open, software wise.

The Console Took Only 3 Days To “Hack”
Yeah, you’re reading that right. In all of 3 days after its release, the console was hacked. I haven’t followed this scene much at all but apparently it took no time for the system to be gotten into and the core software studied. Now, I don’t think anyone felt the system would be un-hackable, but the fact this didn’t take any real time is still hilarious. At least this makes the system somewhat more useful since you can now play the games that probably should have been on the console to begin with and, probably were tested during its development, thanks to one last bit of “salt in the wound” so to speak…

Traces Of Other Games Were Found In The PlayStation Classic Source Code
Since Sony used an open source emulator with this console, various licensing requirements dictated that Sony publish the source code of the PlayStation Classic publicly, and when this was studied it was found that a multitude of much-loved and much-demanded games were actually tested on the console during its development!

Now, we can’t say for sure if these were planned to be on the console all along or if they were just for testing, or whatever options in between could be a possibility, but the list shows what could have been with a console that could have been great, but it wasn’t.

I really had high hopes, but somehow Sony successfully dropped the ball on nearly every point they could with this device — it was clearly just a rush job cash grab, and nothing more. The sad thing is, that doesn’t actually surprise me.