Can A PS5 Play PS1 Games? The Answer Is A Little Complicated

Backward compatibility in video game consoles goes back to the 1980s, but it didn't really catch on back then. Yes, Sega's Master System hit stores in 1985 and played games from the company's first console, the SG-1000, and the following year's Atari 7800 played Atari 2600 games, but for whatever reason, console makers largely abandoned the idea for years afterward. Sega's Genesis console and Game Gear handheld could play Master System games, but only with optional adapters. Stock, out of the box, original hardware only? The concept was dead for the time being, much to the frustration of parents of Nintendo Entertainment System owners who complained to the media about the follow-up Super NES not supporting older cartridges.

That status quo changed with the 2000 release of the Sony PlayStation 2, which was fully backward compatible with PlayStation 1 game discs. Suddenly, there was a new normal: A gamer wanting to save money on a new console could trade in their old console while being able to keep their existing game library. With the PlayStation 2 also being a very reasonably priced DVD player at a time when they were new, this one-two punch of extra features made it an incredibly attractive console, and it sold over 160 million units in its lifetime as a result. 

Since then, though, PlayStation backward compatibility has gotten more confusing and less uniform, and the newest console, the PlayStation 5 can't play PS1 discs. That doesn't mean you can't play PS1 games at all, though.

On paper, it's more than a little frustrating that Sony didn't bother putting any time into developing PlayStation 1 backward compatibility for the PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 consoles, which are based on PC-style x86 architecture. PS1 emulation at full speed has been possible on much weaker computers than those consoles, going back to Bleem a quarter century ago, and that was without access to official Sony documentation, to boot. But for whatever reason, Sony's energy was not focused on letting you play original PS1 discs on its x86 consoles.

That doesn't mean that you can't play emulated PS1 games on a PS4 or PS5, though. Sony offers plenty of PS1 games for download on the PlayStation Store. You can get them a la carte if you want to, but they're also available as part of a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription, and some even have cloud-based streaming options. It's nice to have the option, but it's not the same as full backward compatibility, and plenty of iconic PS1 games are missing from the online catalog. If you have PS1 discs that you'd still like to play, you have to look toward older consoles to get something that can run them. Thankfully, there are a few options, and they're usable with both newer and older TVs.

As noted earlier, being backward compatible with the PlayStation 1 was one of Sony's major selling points for the PlayStation 2, so that's one option for playing PS1 games. If you're aiming to play them on a newer TV that only has HDMI inputs, though, then a PS1 or PS2 is a no-go without using an HDMI scaler to convert the analog video output — that's one thing to remember when buying a classic gaming console. Have no fear, though: The PlayStation 3, Sony's first HD console and the first with HDMI output, is fully backward compatible with PlayStation 1 game discs.

The PS3, though, is where this topic starts to get confusing, though. The launch models, with 20GB and 60GB hard drives, could run PlayStation 2 discs by way of having PS2 hardware stuffed into them, but before too long, this was removed, with software-based emulation taking over. That didn't last very long either, though, with PS2 compatibility removed by the time the "Slim" models of the PS3 hit stores. PS1 backward compatibility never went away, though, so any model you get can play PS1 games.

Sony's two most recent consoles, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, cannot play game discs from the first three PlayStations. Instead, they only have access to games from the first three PlayStations via the PlayStation Store thanks to a combination of emulation and cloud-based streaming. And while the PS5 generally supports titles made for its immediate predecessor, there are some PS4 games that aren't playable on the PS5. Functionality may also vary on certain titles.