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.