PlayStation Head Wasn’t “Trying To Be Disrespectful To Our Heritage” With Quote About Old PlayStation Games

Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Inter­ac­tive Enter­tain­ment, is still in hot water with the gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty over a quote that appeared to dis­miss old­er games. How­ev­er, Ryan told Axios in a recent­ly pub­lished inter­view that he did­n’t mean to “be dis­re­spect­ful to our heritage.” 

The infa­mous quote is from an inter­view with Time Mag­a­zine back in 2017. Ryan was talk­ing about being in Gran Tur­is­mo event where entires from all gen­er­a­tion of con­soles were being shown. “And the PS1 and the PS2 games,” Ryan said, “they looked ancient, like why would any­body play this?”

Right before say­ing this, Ryan spoke on back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, a touchy sub­ject because of PlaySta­tion’s poor approach when com­pared to Microsoft. “When we’ve dab­bled with back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, I can say it is one of those fea­tures that is much request­ed, but not actu­al­ly used much,” said Ryan.

In the inter­view with Axios, Ryan said he is “a lit­tle bit frus­trat­ed at still being hit over the head with this one,” regard­ing the Gran Tur­is­mo quote. “The point I was try­ing to make–obviously not very well–was just how great the PS4 ver­sion looked and how far the series had evolved.” 

It does­n’t mat­ter if Ryan’s com­ments were dis­mis­sive or not, Sony con­tin­ues to ignore play­ers requests for full back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Mean­while, the Xbox Series X and S can run games from the orig­i­nal Xbox era. The PlaySta­tion 5 can only run PlaySta­tion 4 titles.