PlayStation Shoots Down Our PS3 Emulation Hopes

We gather here today, to mourn the loss of our PlayStation 3 emulation hopes. We pay tribute to the fleeting life of said hopes, which were dashed just days after they were born.

If you missed it, it recently came to light that PlayStation had hired a senior build engineer to work within a “newly created preservation team”. Us folk on the internet got all excited about the possibility of an official PlayStation 3 emulation but alas, it seems that might not actually be on the way. Sigh.

We've come a long way since the PlayStation 3. Take a look at Grand Theft Auto V's PlayStation 5 graphics compared to the PS3 original.

Garrett Fredley, who was hired for the position, has now offered some further insight into what his role entails just days after the internet went into meltdown over his appointment. In a thread posted to Twitter, Fredley explained that he might not actually be involved in any emulation work, which means he’ll probably be focused on archiving PlayStation’s legacy titles as we originally assumed.

The post read, “So apparently I broke the internet announcing my work with PlayStation [...] TBD on whether I’ll have much of a role to play personally in any emulation work, although I’ll share what I can if it comes up. It’s only my second day.”

So apparently I broke the internet announcing my work with Playstation

For anyone asking what Game Preservation is / what I do, I did a GDC talk a few years ago on the subject when I worked at EA. My work is similar, although larger in scopehttps://t.co/mWNW5u8uXF

— Garrett Fredley (@SomeCronzaGuy) April 26, 2022

Maybe our hopes aren’t entirely dashed. Fredley does note that it’s “to be decided” whether he works on emulation, which means it could happen further down the road. Likewise, he notes that he’s not working on emulation “personally,” so someone else technically could be - not that I’m scraping the barrel for clues to console myself.

If the team is focusing on building an archive, it will certainly prove to be helpful if PlayStation choses to work on an emulation at a later stage. In the meantime, we’ll soon be able to access various PlayStation 3 titles via cloud streaming on the new Premium tier of PlayStation Plus so that’s something for now I guess.