In September, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) president and CEO Jim Ryan shockingly announced his retirement from SIE – and the end of his PlayStation career – after 30 years of service. Despite confirmation that he will continue in his current role until the end of the current financial year in March 2024, it looks like SIE’s ‘thank you’ party for Jim Ryan has just taken place – seemingly hours before his final The Game Awards show as PlayStation boss. Among the festivities, Jim Ryan has been gifted an incredible PS1-themed PS5 console. While, of course, we want this unique PS5 console like yesterday, it may actually be something you can buy for yourself in 2024.
If you want to play any one of the best FPS games out there at the moment, hop into one of the best RPG games available and spend an evening questing, or even spook yourself with one of the best horror games you can play at the moment, you’ll be able to do all of that and more with a PS5 console. There really are some great new PS5 games on the PlayStation Store – and the free PS Plus games this month are some of the best we’ve seen all year. However, if you want to do all of that in style, you’re probably going to need Jim Ryan’s custom PS1-inspired PlayStation 5 console. Sorry, we don’t make the rules.
As you can see in this image shared by Yuichi Haga below, who operates as the global diversity, equity, and inclusion lead at SIE, Jim Ryan’s custom PS1-themed PlayStation 5 console is – to put it as plainly as possible – stunning. It’s an original PS5 model console in two shades of ‘PlayStation grey’ and comes with a matching DualSense controller – complete with colored buttons (just like the original PlayStation console controllers) and a colored PlayStation logo in the center.
In addition to this, if this wasn’t enough, the input end of the USB charging cable this PS5 console comes with is designed to mimic the input of the original wired PlayStation controller. While a little bulky and something that actually seems to cover part of the front-facing USB-C port when in use, it’s hard to ignore just how fantastic it all looks together. It’s not only a wonderful tribute to Jim Ryan, but a wonderful tribute to the original PlayStation console.
This, interestingly enough, is a console turning 30 next year – in 2024. Do you know what that means? It means we may actually be able to buy something like this in the future – if PlayStation is nice.
In December 2014, all those many (many, many) months ago, PlayStation unveiled and subsequently released the PlayStation 4 20th Anniversary Edition console. As you can see below, much like Jim Ryan’s new PS1-themed PS5 console, this PS4 console was also inspired by the original PlayStation console. The console itself was a light grey and the matching DualShock controller also sported colored symbol buttons – much like the original PlayStation controller. It even came with a matching PlayStation Camera, if you wanted one of those.
Now, we don’t know anything for certain, but we don’t think it would be entirely outrageous for PlayStation to produce a PS5 30th Anniversary Edition console in a similar fashion to this celebratory PlayStation 4 console in 2024. In fact, Jim Ryan’s custom console proves it can quite-literally be done – and that the console itself looks very, very good.
The only drawback, which is a rather strange one, is that Jim Ryan’s PS1-themed console is – looking at the design of the cover plates – an original PlayStation 5 model and not the newly-released PS5 Slim console. Of course, there’s nothing to say that PlayStation wouldn’t release a limited-edition version of this first PlayStation 5 model to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation console, but it would make more sense that any new celebratory console would be a variant of the newer model.
So, frustratingly, only time will tell when it comes to the possibility of a limited-edition PS5 console. PlayStation will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation console in some capacity, but we will just have to wait and see how extravagant those celebrations are when it comes to buyable products.
If you can’t wait until 2024 – or later – to upgrade your PlayStation 5 set-up, you can check out all the best PS5 controllers, the best PS5 headsets, and the best PS5 SSD options right here. With all the games on the way in the next 12 months, you’re really going to need to expand your storage space if you haven’t already – that much is for certain.