Sony embraces its PlayStation history | Opinion
PlayStation turns 30 this year, and Sony is in a celebratory mood – admittedly, the kind of corporate celebratory mood that's largely expressed by trying to get people to buy more stuff, but don't those 30th anniversary consoles and controllers just look lovely?
The company is mining a powerful seam of nostalgia here; 30th anniversaries are a big deal for media properties precisely because the timing means that people who enjoyed them in their teens are now generally affluent and, in mid-life, extremely susceptible to any opportunity to recapture their youth through rose-tinted lenses.
All games companies are more than happy to use nostalgia as a selling point, but Sony's embrace of the 30th anniversary is arguably more notable than a similar approach from Nintendo would be, for example.
Nintendo is an absolute pro at mining nostalgia for profit, thoroughly embracing and exploiting its own back catalogue and history at every turn. Sony, while absolutely not adverse to launching the occasional limited-edition piece of hardware to capitalise on a big milestone, has always seemed rather more reticent about the role that its history and its back catalogue should play in the identity of PlayStation today.
As the company gears up the 30th anniversary hardware, though, there are also widespread signs that attitudes within Sony are changing in this regard; that the PlayStation back catalogue is finally being embraced for the strength it is.
It's not entirely clear why Sony hasn't been keen on promoting its software archives to the same extent as Nintendo, which is constantly re-releasing its games for new platforms, or Microsoft, which has made a huge deal out of backwards compatibility over the years. Sony just generally seemed much less interested in the idea of people playing old games.
It's been happy to celebrate PlayStation's history, of course, and at hardware transitions it has mastered the art of selling "remastered" versions of otherwise relatively recent games – but
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