Sony Refuses To Answer Why The PS1 Classic Comes Pre-Loaded With Twenty Copies Of Hooters Road Trip

Nostalgia sells in the game industry, that’s something we’ve known for decades. Everyone loves to play old games. 8-bit and 16-bit graphics are popular styles even to this day, purely for the aesthetic and nostalgia factor.

Nintendo, the undisputed kings of nostalgia, have gotten away with selling us the exact same old games for unreasonable prices ever since Super Mario All-Stars hit the Super Nintendo. Or maybe when Donkey Kong was ported to the NES. They’ve sold us ports, they’ve sold us remasters, they’ve sold us on the Virtual Console and now their new Switch Online retro library. But their line of retro mini consoles is what’s been setting GameStops on fire and leaving eBay prices in the thousands.

Of course, where there’s money, other businesses will flock to it. Sega released their own, incredibly cheaply made flashback consoles. And now Sony is getting in on it.

The PS1 Classic is set to release right in time for the holidays, and will be packed with twenty classic PS1 titles. However, many fans are concerned that Sony may be overlooking many of the games that made the PS1 such a great console in the first place. Playstation’s early mascots, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, are nowhere to be seen on the console’s twenty pre-installed games.

This, in addition to the odd choice to include the PS1’s original controllers without the joysticks, and the bizarre choice to not include the console’s AC adapter in the box, make the steep $99.99 USD price tag a bit questionable. But the biggest enigma of the whole debacle is that Sony’s confirmed PS1 game list was twenty of the same exact game. Hooters Road Trip.

The poorly received PS1 abomination was a buggy, clunky mess of a racing title. Shovelware, with the name “Hooters” slapped on it. The PS1, home to classic franchises like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, timeless games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and PaRappa the Rapper, and all in all just so many better games to put on there. Any of the Tomb Raider games, Suikoden, Legend of Dragoon? There’s so many great games. Why did they only put Hooters Road Trip on there?

Seriously. Hooters Road Trip. That was the best you could come up with, Sony? And twenty copies of it. All the same game. It’s not like there’s physical copies they had to scrounge around their vaults for, they just downloaded twenty copies of the same game off an emulator site or something. This really just makes no sense at all, whatsoever.

Fans have complained on social media, hounding Sony on Facebook, Twitter, and on their Playstation blog. And Sony has refused to even answer. We sent Sony a message, and they left it on read. They’re seeing the fans upset, they’re just not doing anything about it and no one can figure out why. At its core, the PS1 Classic is just sounding more and more like some cheap cash grab by the day. The least they could do is explain their reasoning. Do they not want to take out of their PS Now sales or something? Do they want us to buy all the classics people actually want off the Playstation Store?

It just makes no sense. None if it makes sense. Hooters Road Trip isn’t even that good.

The PS1 Classic is dated for December 3rd. Pre-orders are already filled up everywhere, don’t even bother looking for it. I already checked. I managed to reserve three at three different GameStops and one at Best Buy.