This is the first in a guest column series from Time Extension, a site dedicated to bringing you the biggest news and features from the world of retro and classic gaming. Showcasing an exciting mixture of news, features, interviews, reviews, guides and much more, Time Extension seeks to elevate vintage gaming to the next level rather than treating it as a footnote.
It’s fair to say Sony’s on a bit of a rollercoaster at the moment. The unexpected critical and commercial success of Helldivers II gave PlayStation a welcome fillup earlier in the year, only for the big-budget Concord to crash and burn spectacularly just days after being on sale. Then came Astro Bot, a joyous shot in the arm that restored faith in the brand – until Sony announced the PS5 Pro would cost $700.
If all of this has made your head spin as a PlayStation fan then the recent announcement of a series of special 30th-anniversary products – all clad in that iconic PS1 grey – will have you reeling once more. In case you missed it, Sony is packaging up the PS5 Pro, PS5 Digital Edition, PS Portal, DualSense and DualSense Edge in the “original PlayStation color design” to celebrate 30 years of the famous name.
This isn’t the first Sony has used the intoxicating power of nostalgia to tempt its customers to part with their hard-earned cash; a decade ago it released a 20th-anniversary variant of the PS4, again resplendent in PS1 clothing. It’s proved to be an effective way of coaxing open even the tightest of purse strings, but in the case of the PS5 Pro, I can’t help but wonder if nostalgia is being used more as a band-aid than a marketing tool.
Putting aside the (perfectly valid) arguments that $700 isn’t actually a lot of money for a piece of gaming hardware as powerful as PS5 Pro, there’s no getting around the fact Sony’s asking its fans to dig deep in a period of keen financial hardship. With the cost of living crisis still gripping much of the planet and the games industry itself in something of a slump, the price announcement has gone down like a lead balloon. I imagine Sony anticipated that the response to PS5 Pro’s price wouldn’t have been glowing, hence the fact it followed up so quickly with this 30th-anniversary range.
Of course, it’s no surprise Sony would mark the 30th birthday of PlayStation in some meaningful way – after all, it did so with the PS4 a decade ago. It’s perhaps a little unfair to label the recent announcement as a cynical cover-up job to draw attention away from the price, but it has undoubtedly worked.
Judging from the reaction not just online but from close colleagues and friends, the PS1-branded gear has gone down a storm, proving once again that nostalgia is a powerful and potent drug – powerful enough to wash away the bad taste generated by that sky-high price confirmation. I’m actually amazed Sony didn’t go the whole hog and make this the default design for the PS5 Pro, but by making it a limited-time offer it has at least created an environment where scalpers will drive the price so high that $700 will seem almost reasonable in a few months’ time.
As the editor of a retro-focused website, you’d think I would be the target audience for such a product – and goodness knows, I’ve been suckered by this kind of thing many times in the past. When Sega announced its Astro City Mini micro-console would offer arcade-perfect renditions of Virtua Fighter, Alien Storm and Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder, I fumbled for my credit card so quickly it almost spun right out of my sweaty fingers. Equally, I’ve been taken with Nintendo’s efforts to dress-up its GBA and 3DS consoles in NES and SNES designs.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and personally speaking, the PS5 family ranks as one of my least-favourite console designs – and certainly the least attractive member of the PlayStation lineage. Painting it in PS1 colours and dropping in that iconic red, green, yellow and blue logo certainly improves things, but you can’t change the fact that it’s still a PS5 underneath the alluring makeup.
It’s also somewhat paradoxical that Sony hasn’t yet given us a PS2-flavoured variant of one of its more recent systems. I get the whole “30 years since the original” angle, but the PS2 is the best-selling home console of all time, so you’d think the nostalgic pull for that would be greater than it is with the PS1, which trails its successor in lifetime sales by over 50 million units. The PS2 is undoubtedly a much better looking console too.
Still, I’m deviating somewhat from my original point. While nostalgia is always a feeling that’s worth cultivating and encouraging – Time Extension arguably wouldn’t exist without it – we should always be on guard for underhanded attempts to leverage it in order to divert attention from other shortcomings or failings. Despite all of this, I’m not too proud to admit I’ll probably experience a slight twinge of FOMO when pre-orders go live, and I know several of my colleagues are already counting down the days until release.
A cynical marketing ploy it may be, but Sony knows exactly what it’s doing here.
Damien McFerran is the Editor of Time Extension. He has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media’s sites from an editorial perspective.