PlayStation forms a preservation team to “ensure our industry’s history isn’t forgotten”

Sony has formed a preservation team, which will likely work toward keeping older PlayStation games available and playable on newer consoles.

Yesterday (April 25), Garrett Fredley – a senior build engineer at PlayStation – posted on LinkedIn that today was “my first day as a senior build engineer for PlayStation, working as one of their initial hires for the newly created preservation team!”

While the post has since been deleted (a screenshot is visible here), Fredley shared the following:

“Game preservation was my first career passion. It was my first foray into the world of software engineering / dev ops, and into a world that so many are unaware of. I was just a novice back then, contributing any way I could regardless of my inexperience. Now, I’m back to it, no longer the novice I once was.

“Let’s go and ensure our industry’s history isn’t forgotten,” ends Fredley’s post.

Fredley also thanked Mike Bishop – global quality assurance (QA) manager at PlayStation – for bringing him onto the team. While nothing’s confirmed, Bishop’s role in QA suggests that Sony may be working on ways to make older PlayStation games functional and playable on newer consoles, without running into issues with performance or quality.

This can be easier said than done – when Nintendo launched its Nintendo 64 emulator on the Nintendo Switch, games like Ocarina Of Time and Mario Kart 64 launched with a variety of visual and performance bugs.

Sony recently announced a rebrand for PlayStation Plus, with a library featuring over 700 games. Many of these titles were originally launched on PS1, PS2 and PSP – so it’s possible that Sony will focus any preservation efforts toward expanding this library.

The topic of video game preservation has been frequently raised by the games industry over the last year. Back in November 2021, Xbox boss Phil Spencer called for “legal emulation” to push preservation, stating that letting fans “buy any game, or own any game” is a “great North Star for us as an industry”.

In other gaming news, a Gran Turismo 7 update has added three new cars and an extra track layout.