15 PS3 Facts You Might Not Know, Maybe

So it seems like you fine folks love it when we throw some lesser known PlayStation trivia your way, so it’s a good job for you that we’ve found a bevy of obscure tidbits about the PS3 that you might not know about. And no, we promise that none of these facts are either “people didn’t like it at first” or “it got the Spider-man font”. We like to think we’ve done a bit more research than that. If you’re wanting to learn a little bit more about Sony’s third mainline effort, these are the PS3 facts that have probably passed you by.

 

1. The Lack of Controller Rumble

Nintendo are often given credit for introduced rumble to the world with the Rumble Pak for the N64, but Sony had Nintendo beat with the Dual Analog PS1 controller by 2 days. It’s just that the Rumble Pak came to the West first. Still, going full auto with a rifle by holding down a controller’s trigger, or accelerating across dirt in a racing game just doesn’t feel the same without the vibration of a controller to back the experience up. If the controller isn’t moving itself off the table with its vibrations, we’re not interested, which is why it’s so strange to remember that the original version of the PlayStation 3’s controller, the SIXAXIS (sorry for invoking its name), didn’t actually have rumble features as standard.

But why? Legal bollocks, of course.

Originally, Sony were planning to launch the PS3 with the Dualshock 3, which would have included vibration and haptic feedback, but Sony became embroiled in a lawsuit with the company Immersion regarding haptic feedback patents in previous PlayStation controllers. Sony would try to fight the lawsuit, only to lose and tried to appeal it in court during the mid-2000s, which is why Sony had to scramble to release a controller to launch alongside the PS3. Hence, the SIXAXIS was born, not out of want but necessity. Nobody ever wanted the SIXAXIS.

The appeal failed, and Sony would then pay nearly $100 million to Immersion while entering into a business relationship with the company. Meanwhile, Microsoft, whose Xbox controllers were also named in the suit, settled out of court immediately and were able to carry on using vibration in their Xbox 360 controllers.

 

2. MAG Holds a Multiplayer World Record

Since gaming’s inception, there have been many world records broken with regards to video games, whether it’s the most amount of units sold for a particular game or console, or the longest someone has been able to play a specific game without their bladder bursting out the side of their body. Do they still do records like that these days? Anyway, sometimes the records are about what the games themselves are capable of, particularly when it comes to how many players you can stick on one server or even in one multiplayer game. Naturally, PC gaming holds the biggest records, but when it comes to the largest number of players in a console FPS game, the PS3 takes the crown.

The accolade goes to the multiplayer shooter MAG, which could support up to 256 players in one game. Granted, most video games would never get even close to being that full, but the fact that MAG could reach those levels made it a world record holder. Despite the fact that online servers for MAG have been nuked years ago, making the game completely unplayable due to its reliance on online play, no other console game has managed to reach the same amount of players that MAG did.

The Battlefield games are probably the closest you’ll get to reaching the same amount of players, along with battle royale games, but MAG is still undefeated. So, if someone wants a free bit of publicity, make a console FPS with 257 players.

 

3. Your New Controllers Work on the PS3

Backwards compatibility is something that’s only really spoken about with regards to games, and it’s a well known fact that the four earliest models of PS3 were able to play most PS1 and PS2 games without issue. It’s rarer that peripherals are also backwards compatible, though the industry has gotten a lot better in that regard. PlayStation’s current generation has allowed PS4 controllers to mostly work on the PS5, though without the benefit of the DualSense’s capabilities, of course, while Xbox One and Xbox Series X & S controllers are basically identical. However, the PS3 was actually forwards compatible, though whether that feature was intentional or not, who knows?

Essentially, all you need to do in order to use your PS4 or even PS5 controller on the PS3 is plug the controller into the console using a USB cable. From there, you should be able to play PS3 games with most of the features enabled, though you might run into some issues with vibration and tilt control. The XMB feature also doesn’t work with a PS5 controller as the PlayStation button doesn’t register. From a preservation standpoint, forward compatibility should be a consideration going forward, as original PS3 hardware will eventually begin to dwindle, especially with how flimsy PS3 controllers generally are.

You can’t even throw your controller at the wall nine times thanks to the Bed of Chaos without it breaking these days, unbelievable.

 

4. Fans Are Bringing Back PS Home

Say what you want about the PS3’s various successes and failures, but there’s no arguing that PlayStation Home was ahead of its time. Beating out the trend of “metaverses” and virtual social hubs by over a decade, PlayStation Home was basically a free-to-play social MMO that often served as an advertisement for whatever games would be launching on the PS3 in the coming weeks. Who doesn’t want to play Poker inside of a game space based on The Godfather II, or hang out with friends at the Everybody’s Golf minigolf lounge? While Home had its doors open for six years from 2009 to 2015, the game would never leave beta and be scrapped by Sony due to a “shifting landscape”, whatever that means.

However, a dedicated team of fans and modders who never forgot how much fun PlayStation Home could be have been working on reviving the game in its entirety. The Destination Home project has been a fan-driven, non-profit attempt to revive the PlayStation Home experience, which has required the team to essentially reverse-engineer the entire game from whatever data has been stored on the team’s PS3s, or donated from various fans and developers over the years.

While the project is still in a closed beta stage at the time of writing, we’re definitely excited to see one of Sony’s bigger and more experimental swings be preserved by a team who clearly love what they’re doing.

 

5. The PS5’s SSD Installation Feature Was On PS3 First

Gaming in the non-Clinton years has seen the file sizes of games explode quicker than someone’s head in any scene of The Boys, so much so that you often have to seek out alternative storage methods to ensure all of your games are readily available. For the PS5, Sony added a port inside the console to allow for certain proprietary storage options, should the owner decide that they need more room for all of their video games. Or, more likely, Activision decided that they want to add another patch to Call of Duty. Obviously that extra balance patch means that I need to delete a bunch of games off the SSD. Makes sense.

However, what many might not realize is that the option to add an SSD to your console actually dates back to the PS3, as players could easily install an SSD into their console and play the latest PS3 games with improved loading times and less texture pop-in. Granted, adding an SSD to your PS3 back in 2012-13 wasn’t as easy as it is now, as the prices for an SSD back then were astronomical. Now, as we head into 2025 and the tech has become more readily available and cheaper, it’s a lot easier to add an SSD to your PS3 and improve your gaming experience. The process of upgrading to an SSD is fairly straightforward, though you’ll need a screwdriver, a USB cable, your laptop or PC and the drive in question needs to be 2.5 inches in size.

Unfortunately though, upgrading to an SSD won’t make MGS 4’s cutscenes go any faster.

 

6. MGS 4 Was Originally Going To Be On The 360 Too

Speaking of (we do good segues here at Cultured Vultures), did you know that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots was at one point running on the Xbox 360, and could have been ported to Microsoft’s landmark console? Alas, it was never to be, with MGS 4 seemingly locked to the PS3 until Konami releases volume three of their MGS Master Collection series. They’ve got to hit you with some kind of Portable Ops/Peace Walker/Phantom Pain bundle first, obviously.  Anyway, as other PS3 games have been remastered or ported to other consoles over the years, MGS 4 stands out as one of the only out and out PS3 exclusives still standing. However, that almost wasn’t the case when a group of Konami developers nearly made the game available on Xbox 360.

As the story goes, according to the game’s assistant producer Ryan Payton when speaking to Steven L Kent for the latter’s book The Ultimate History Of Video Games Volume 2, most of the Konami dev team were hardcore Sony fans who thought that MGS 4 would look like crap on the 360. An R&D team would prove them wrong, however, as they proved that the game would run pretty well on the Xbox 360, and with no exclusivity agreement with Sony, there was nothing stopping MGS 4 from coming to the Xbox 360. Nothing, except for the one thing Sony had that the Xbox didn’t: blu-ray discs. Because blu-ray could hold four times as much data as DVDs, MGS 4 would have to be released across multiple discs in order to be available on the 360, something Konami were unwilling to do.

As such, the Xbox 360 version never came to be, and would lead to Sony’s Jack Tretton saying that MGS 4 was “only possible on PS3 thanks in part to Blu-ray”. Perhaps because of the PS3’s known wonkiness with ports, maybe we’ll see Konami return to the 360 version of the game for the Master Collection?

 

7. PS3 Games That Wound Up On PS4 Instead

The PS4 boasts a lot of excellent games, but did you know that a decent chunk, or at least a good handful of them, were slated for release on the PS3 originally?

Take 2016’s The Last Guardian from Sony Japan Studio for instance, a game that was actually in development since 2007, announced for the PS3 in 2009 and slated for a 2011 release. Obviously, Sony and Japan Studio missed that scheduled release window by a margin you could park several buses in, but The Last Guardian is far from the only example of games being announced for the PS3 only to be delayed or otherwise moved to another platform.

We could also mention the super obvious example of Final Fantasy 15, which was announced in 2006 as a spin off game called Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and whose troubled development could easily form the basis of Jason Schreier’s next book. Nioh was also slated for a PS3 release, as the project started life in 2004 as a multimedia project based on an unfinished Akira Kurosawa script, before eventually launching on PS4 in 2017 as a completely separate game entirely. Compared to the development hell that Duke Nukem Forever went through, Nioh managed to come out the other side pretty well, which is more than we can say for our mental health after playing it.

 

8. Pre-Zoom Zoom Capabilities

Not to give everyone some unwanted lockdown flashbacks, but if you were someone who had to conduct all of your business over Zoom for a while there, did you know that the PS3 could have done the same thing?

Granted, you would have to be PSN friends with the up-to-five coworkers you’d be sharing a video call with, but the possibility was there on PS3 to have a full-blown video group chat. The Xbox 360 also had a video call function, and even supported Skype, but video calls on the Xbox 360 were a strictly one on one affair, so the fact that Sony had the vision to implement group video chats over a decade before the whole world would start relying on them to get work done is pretty wild.

The video call feature on PS3 was compliant with most USB webcams, though most would likely have used the feature with either the EyeToy or the PlayStation Eye, Sony’s precursor to the Xbox’s Kinect. These days, despite communication still being a huge part of the online console gaming experience, Sony and Microsoft have basically left the video communication capabilities to services like Discord. Still, it’s amazing to remember that the PS3 was pretty far ahead of the curve when it comes to keeping in touch with your circle of friends. We’ve tried looking into whether you can still use video chat on the PS3 today, but we can’t find any conclusive evidence. Google’s crappy AI overviews are not helpful either, so if anyone with a PS3 can confirm for us if you can still video chat among friends, that’d be swell.

 

9. The PS3D TV Is Not Free

We’ve spoke about how the PSP beat the 3DS to portable 3D displays, kind of, but for the PS3, did you know that Sony released a fully 3D display designed to work with the console? The aptly titled PlayStation 3D Display was a 24-inch monitor shaped like a PSP Go that came with emitters and special glasses that allowed you to experience your games and media in the glorious third dimension. While 3D TVs were becoming more common around 2011, this was Sony’s attempt at linking 3D with gaming, receiving mixed results in the process.

Unlike the PS2 TV which had the console and TV strapped together like some kind of unholy tech-bomination, the PS3D Display required you to bring your own console. That said, the TV was designed with the PlayStation 3 in mind, allowing you to enjoy a 3D display so long as you were in a fairly dark room and were wearing the special glasses that definitely make you look cool and not like a dork.

Perhaps the best feature of the display though was the SimulView Mode, which allowed two users to see two different images so long as they were both donning the glasses in games like Killzone 3, MotorStorm Apocalypse and Gran Turismo 5. It’s kinda like the co-op mechanics in Dead Space 3, except with about 80% less insanity.

It’s all pretty cool in theory, but the $500 price tag, variety of drawbacks, and the general apathy towards 3D as part of your main TV experiences meant that the display is a fairly rare find now, but expect to be paying a lot less than that $500.

 

10. It Helped You Save Lives

It’s not often that we get to talk about the good things that someone or some company has done, so credit where credit is due for how Sony helped out scientists with the Folding@home initiative.

For those who don’t know, Folding@home is a distributed computing project that essentially aims to use the computing power of volunteers around the world to help scientists research new therapeutics for various diseases. They accomplish this by using the computing power that’s been volunteered to simulate protein dynamics, so scientists can better understand how to tackle illnesses. Typically, folding is only available for PCs, but in 2007, Sony allowed PS3 owners to contribute to the program. The reason? The console’s Cell processor was essentially outperforming modern PCs almost 20 times over, providing a nearly unparalleled level of speed and efficiency.

Running from March 2007 to November 2012, the Folding@home program on the PS3 would run in the background while players could enjoy whatever game they felt like playing. Enjoyment while also doing a genuine good deed for the betterment of the scientific community? That’s a fair deal as far as we’re concerned.

By the end of the program, over 15 million people had contributed to the 100 million hours that were donated to the project, greatly advancing discoveries for diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and cancer.

 

11. Gears Of War 3 Was Ported To The PS3

Those who kept up to date with gaming news in 2020 (not like there was much else to do) might have heard the story of a PS3 build of Gears of War 3. It’s a bit of trivia that’s become infinitely more interesting in hindsight though, as Microsoft have adopted a more platform-agnostic approach to releasing their games. At this point, Phil Spencer would probably port Sea of Thieves to the Ouya if he thought it’d make Xbox a bit of a profit, so the idea of a Gears of War game coming to the PlayStation is honestly pretty damn likely at this point. You know, if it hasn’t already been confirmed by the time this comes out. Anyway, there had been previous videos of Gears Of War 3 running on the PS3, but those were apparently hackers trying to develop their own port using data from a 2011 hack of Epic Games, but in 2020, hacker PixelButts managed to find the genuine article.

The footage uploaded to YouTube showcases a full playthrough of an incomplete build of Gears 3 dated May 19th, 2011, a few months before the game would launch worldwide on the Xbox 360. Epic then confirmed that the build PixelButts had obtained was real, stating: “This footage is a byproduct of Epic’s internal Unreal Engine 3 testing process, which utilized both Gears and Unreal Tournament, and was never part of any actual product work for PlayStation 3”.

Basically, Epic were just looking to flex the capabilities of the Unreal Engine by seeing if they could port Gears Of War 3 to the PS3, but the port was never actually meant to see the light of day.

 

12. Sony Had to Pay PS3 Linux Users

In our PS2 facts video, we spoke about how you could turn your PS2 into a Linux machine and create your own games, which itself was almost a spiritual successor to the Net Yaroze technology on the PS1, which was also mentioned in another one of our fact videos. We’re establishing a Cultured Vultures cinematic trivia-verse over here. The Linux collaboration went into the PS3 era too, with Sony offering the OtherOS section of the PS3 allowing players to install a bunch of different PC OS onto their consoles. Everything seemed fine and wonderful with the Linux PS3 users for a while there, until Sony made the decision to just remove OtherOS from the PS3 entirely via a random firmware update in 2010.

Well, some PS3 owners took the removal of the Linux functionality on PS3 quite personally, gathering together to hit Sony with a class-action lawsuit. The suit started in 2010, and took six years to finally gain results, with Sony agreeing to a settlement with the litigants. Sony had to pay a whopping $55 to anyone who could reliably proof that they owned a PS3 that was able to utilize OtherOS (which was only the earlier “fat PS3” models as the slim PS3 never had OtherOS capabilities), while anyone who maybe considered a brief dalliance with OtherOS on their Fat PS3s were eligible for a staggering $9. Meanwhile, the lawyers who brought the case to Sony were given a meager $2.25 million.

Hard to think who was the real winner in that one.

 

13. Blue Label PS3 Games Were A Thing

When you think of the PS3s game cover, you think black, to match the console and controller. That black trim was an iconic look for the PS3 and while in 2009, PlayStation would change the cover design in conjunction with the launch of the PS3 Slim, the black trim remained. In 2014 though, after the launch of the PS4 and the PS Vita had been available for 3 years, Sony made the decision to start printing game covers in blue instead of black. The move was seen as a way to ensure consistency in design across all three PlayStation consoles, with the first game to launch with this blue cover design in North America being Deception IV: Blood Ties. As you’d expect when a company makes a wide sweeping change, people were completely and totally okay wit– yeah, no. It was awful.

Just one look at the cover and it’s easy to see how ill thought out this decision was, as the covers are basically indistinguishable from PS4 covers. Yeah, there’s a 3 at the top instead of a 4, but it’s still easy to overlook details like that. The move led to a lot of confusion from casual gamers, with some people purchasing PS3 games thinking they’d be compatible with the PS4, which wasn’t the case. Sony would later scrap these blue cover plans within five months, with only fourteen games in total available with just a blue cover variant. These games include Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Murdered: Soul Suspect, and perhaps weirdly most famously, Drakengard 3, among others.

As with anything rare and slightly weird, second-hand collectors will pay hand over fist to complete the collection. Good luck finding the cardboard cover of the God Of War Collection.

 

14. The Leap Year Bug

If you’ve made it to this point, you probably have the attention span that suggests you actually lived through the Y2K problem. No Subway Surfers or Family Guy episodes at the side of the screen for you.

Also known as the Millenium Bug, Y2K was the belief that due to the formatting of calendar data only requiring two digits instead of four, computers would basically be unable to distinguish between 1900 and 2000. The work that engineers and the like did ahead of time prevented any major mishaps from occurring, but they say that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Flash cut to 2010, where Sony experienced their own mini Y2K crisis specifically affecting the Fat PS3s, where a glitch involving the console’s clock resulted in the console considering 2010 a leap year.

As those Fat PS3s tried to connect to the PlayStation Network on February 29th, 2010, a date that simply doesn’t exist, players ultimately were met with widespread connectivity issues as the consoles simply wouldn’t connect to the PlayStation Network. What made matters worse is that players who were only looking to play offline games like Bioshock 2 or Heavy Rain, both of which had recently launched, also ran into issues. The problem was resolved within a couple of days, making nowhere near as much of a black eye on the history of PSN as the 23 day outage that occurred just a year later.

Still, for those who had adopted the PS3 at launch, this snafu was a bit of a slap in the face for those players, but at least Sony protected them from playing Heavy Rain.

 

15. inFamous Was Going To Be Very Different

While there’s some merit to the idea that game developers should focus on new ideas instead of always trying to remake the past, we’d like to believe that there’s at least some value in reviving games that aren’t available on modern platforms. You know, for the sake of preservation, or in the case of Infamous and its sequel, because being a badass with sick lightning powers is pretty cool. Sure, both games might have been edgier than a certain member of U2 in a TLC match against the Hardy Boyz, especially if you decided to full send down the evil Cole McGrath narrative choices, but they were incredibly fun exclusives and a genuine reason to buy a PS3. However, according to Sucker Punch themselves, the original plan for Infamous was going to be quite a bit different.

Writing on the PlayStation Blog in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Sucker Punch, co-founder Chris Zimmerman shared some insight on what the original vision for Infamous would have been. If you said “property management meets superpowers”, then well done: you read the same blog from back in 2017. According to Zimmerman, the team wanted a different kind of challenge after the Sly Cooper games, falling in love with the idea of a superhero story. However, the original gimmick of what would become Infamous is that you’d be a superhero who was actually a property developer in their day job, building the city you’d have to fight to protect. We reckon it sounds cool in theory, but Zimmerman states how awesome it actually was in execution: “It wasn’t”.

What definitely is awesome but still didn’t make it into the game for some reason is “motorcycle parkour”, which is exactly as it sounds. In celebration of inFamous’ 10th anniversary, Sucker Punch shared some more behind the scenes footage of the game, including the reveal that the game’s hero was able to pull sick tricks on a bike in a manner similar to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Maybe we’ll get some sick horse parkour in Ghost Of Tsushima 2.

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