The PlayStation Classic Might Have 36 Games On Board That You Can't Play

The PlayStation Classic launched with 20 classic games from the fifth generation of gaming that helped make the PSX an iconic gaming device. However, it turns out that the PlayStation Classic might have been designed to offer a lot more options than what it originally launched with.

Twitter user RyanvsJah posted a collage of images of the games that were found in the PlayStation Classic databank that could have, but weren't, included as playable titles on the miniature system.

Ryan claims that none of the games on the list, which includes classics like Tomb Raider and Tomba, as well as the top-selling Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Vagrant Story. Other highly requested games on the list included Gran Turismo and the Crash Bandicoot titles, along with Ehrgeiz and Driver.

Many of the iconic games that helped shape the PSX era back during the 1990s were in the database. However, they aren't playable.

There's a link to a github repository that features a dump of the titles that were tested on the PlayStation Classic, including Legacy of Kain, the original Fighting Force, horror-classics like Parasite Eve, and Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol to name but a few.

It appears Sony tested a wide number of different games from different regions, including the U.S., Europoean, and Japanese versions of Silent Hill and Street Fighter Alpha 3, as well as the multiple region versions of Grand Theft Auto 2 and Klonda: Door to Phantamile.

It would have been really cool having some of these games included in the line-up, but what happened?

According to GameRevolution the 36 additional games in the source code will simply be there for display for those who tinker with the system's files, since Sony has claimed that it won't be adding any additional games to the playable line-up for the PlayStation Classic via any post-launch updates.

Others have argued that due to the size of the ISOs including all of the additional games would have been more than what the system's built-in memory could handle. So, maybe it was a matter of picking and choosing what worked well with the open-source emulator, and what would fit within the specs?

However, memory these days is cheap, and 100GB worth of storage space wouldn't have been much of a cost-related problem as, say, 1TB. So, the better question is: why not double the memory space and add some of those fan-favorite games?

Well, according to some people in the Twitter thread offering their armchair opinions on the matter, it could be due to licensing issues with the publishers. While that may be true for games with serious copyright issues, like Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha, which was published by Capcom but the rights to the characters belong to the artist, what about games like PaRappa The Rapper, which was developed and published by Sony? Not every theory about why the games weren't included adds up to make a lot of sense, but hackers and modders are continually tweaking and modifying the system, so I'm sure this story is far from over.