A Sony executive has implied that there may still be hope for future PlayStation 2 compatibility in the PlayStation 3.
A report on Kotaku says that in the most recent issue of EGM, PlayStation Network Director Eric Lempell said a return to backwards compatibility could yet happen. “We haven’t talked about that yet,” Lempell said in the interview, “but there are possibilities through technology and software emulation to make that possible.”
Lempell said the company had no “specific plans” regarding the future of compatibility, but in the same interview, Sony Computer Entertainment Senior Vice President Peter Dille mirrored Lempell comments, saying backwards compatibility is “important to us.”
Early versions of the PlayStation 3 offered hardware-based PlayStation 2 support via the Emotion Engine CPU, but the European, Australian and Korean systems, as well as the newer 80GB model in North America, were produced without the chip, relying on less effective software emulation instead. The 40GB version of the console eliminated PlayStation 2 compatibility entirely.
The full article will appear in the next edition of EGM, which will be on shelves soon.
