The Internet is ablaze with rumours that the Sony PlayStation 4 will be backwardly compatible. Not only that, but the PlayStation 3 will be backwardly compatible once again even though it used to be... but now isn't...

German site, Gamefront has done some good work by finding and translating a Sony Japan job advert. Our Google translation shows the key lines:



and



The job on offer is for 'PCS' staff - with PCS standing for 'Professional Career Staff', e.g. management and support rather than the game-creating Product Development Staff (PDS).

Not that the rumour mill is that interested in that; the words that are being extracted by the Internet are, "...and next-generation systems".

These are being slammed together with 'PS/PS2/PS3/PSP' and 'emulator' to prove that not only is PlayStation 4 going to be backwardly compatible, but PS3 is going to return to what should be its natural state of backwards compatibility - remember like the 60Gb versions were in the UK?

Is it only us, or is there a vague possibility that the job in question maybe to create legacy (e.g. 'classic' or 'old') games to a format that could be played in Sony's upcoming Home? Or that could be playable via PlayStation store downloads with some emulation encoded?

We would be steaming, spewing mad if we'd bought a 40Gb, £299, not backwardly-compatible PS3, got rid of our previous games, settled back in to acceptance only then to be offered a firmware upgrade in a year's time.

We would ask, "Why did you get rid of the 60Gb that had a version of the PS2's GS GPU on the motherboard (but not in the 40Gb) in the first place?"

(Sony would respond, "cost" and walk away quickly.)

Equally if we were Sony shareholders, we'd be saying, "Why not, like Nintendo Virtual Console and Microsoft Originals, make classic PSOne and PS2 games available as downloads? That will get people to come to Home?!! We've got thousands of those classic bloody games!"

As for the PS4 'in the works' stories. Well, of course it is... that's no big secret. The insanity is to think that Sony is recruiting people to build emulation software for a set of chips that haven't been bloody well finalised yet.

PSP-2 anybody? Eh?