Summary
- Sony releases amazing retro PlayStation themes for 30th anniversary.
- Themes include nostalgic startup sequences and system screen changes.
- Limited availability of themes is unnecessary; Sony should keep them.
Sony has been pretty great about leveraging their history for nostalgia points in recent years, and for their 30th anniversary, they’ve given us retro PlayStation themes for our consoles. Yay! But, for a “limited time”. Boo!
The 30th Anniversary Startups Are Phenomenal
These themes have two main components. The first is a retro startup sequence thart mimics that of the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, or PlayStation 4 on your PlayStation 5 console.
Being an original PlayStation guy myself, I get chills right in my nostalgia bones when I hear that PS1 startup sound, and hearing it over a modern soundbar rather than my ratty old CRT TV’s mono speaker is a real treat.
Whichever PlayStation is your favorite, there’s a startup here to please you, but beyond that the theme also makes changes to the system screens of the PlayStation 5, with an image of the older console visible at the top edge of the screen. I think all of these have been done tastefully, and with plenty of care.
There’s No Reason to Limit Their Time
So, assuming that we can all agree these nostalgic themes are pretty great, why oh why does Sony want to take them away? I don’t even know what the vague “limited time” means. Despite spending a fair amount of time hitting up search engines, I couldn’t find an official end-date from Sony, so it could be days, months, or years for all we know.
I know I said there’s no reason to limit these themes, but that’s not strictly true, Certainly, there’s no technical reason to limit how long we have access to these themes, but there are psychological marketing reasons to give us a vague, arbitrary time limit. If nothing else, it encourages people to go check these themes out if, like me, they haven’t turned their PlayStations on in a while.
By artificially making something scarce in some way, you generate a lot of excitement and interest. Which is what you’d want for an event like the 30th anniversary of your product.
PlayStation Has an Amazing Legacy
Astro’s Playroom God Of War Kratos Atreus Bots Boat
To me, it still feels like Sony’s PlayStation is a newcomer to gaming, but that’s just because I was there when the PS1 landed, to sweep away my interest in the SNES or Genesis. At this point, PlayStation has one of the best legacies in all gaming. Equal to the likes of Atari, Sega, and Nintendo. And, in my opinion, of course, far beyond what the fading star of Xbox has achieved.
Sony has done a “generally” great job of capitalizing on that legacy, but it hasn’t been perfect by a long shot. The company is sitting on numerous dormant franchises, it has many games stuck on older generation consoles that could use remasters. Its support for older games via emulation is frankly lackluster. And it failed to match what Nintendo’s NES and SNES classic consoles did, with the ill-fated PS1 classic. However, with game titles like Astrobot and the addition of retro PlayStation games to PlayStation Plus, Sony’s definitely getting into the groove here.
These anniversary themes are a big tick on the “good job” side of the list, and I really hope that the “time-limited” part of it turns out to be untrue.
It’s Literally a Free Win for You, Sony
No one wants these retro themes to go away. Sony’s clearly already done the work, so all they have to do to get a big PR win here is, well, nothing. I cynically suspect that the plan all along was to say the themes were going away and then do a u-turn on that decision thanks to “popular demand”, but on the off chance that I’m wrong, why not listen to reason Sony? Everyone will like it if you don’t turn these themes off, and we’ll be on the PlayStation 6 by the time the next big date rolls around. So, do the right thing.