Since releasing in 2013, Sony’s PlayStation 4 has seen thousands of games, broken plenty of records, and made more than a handful of people rush over to the nearest wiki. But what are some PS4 facts that are a little less well known?
1. Sling It Real Good
There’s an old Welsh saying that goes: “he who slings the first poop slings the hardest poop of all.” I’ve actually just made that up, but remarkably what isn’t made up is the wild story behind the PlayStation 4’s rarest ever physical game.
Or is it?
Developed by Diggidy, 2018’s Poop Slinger is a rather poor (or poo?) man’s version of classic lightgun games in which you throw bum matter at unsuspecting citizens. It’s pretty bad, and pretty much nobody played it.
However, in 2019, Diggidy teamed up with a company called Limited Rare Games to release a physical version of the game, who also got a lot of raised eyebrows for completely copying the logo for Limited Run Games, and then later Super Rare Games.
Unfortunately, Limited Rare went bankrupt and only sold 84 copies of the 1000 manufactured copies of Poop Slinger, which is the minimum that Sony will allow anyone to manufacture, meaning that any one of those 84 copies sold now shift for a couple of grand.
Just a reminder: this game is still available digitally on the PlayStation Store, and Steam too, where it has amassed a whopping 3 user reviews.
There are a lot of layers to this shit sandwich of a story, and I really don’t think it can be taken at face value at all. A weird wrinkle is that Limited Rare Games actually did come back in 2021, though supposedly under different management, and are doing a very similar shtick. Their most recent release was Death Park, a mobile game that costs nothing but is now selling for like $50 just because it’s plastic. You are right to have a lot of questions.
Where are the other 916 copies of Poop Slinger? Who is actually running Limited Rare nowadays? How much poop could a poop slinger sling if a poop slinger could sling poop? Let me just definitively say right now that you should not be putting your money into the Poop Slinger market.
2. That’s Not Very Bueno
Isn’t the internet scary? One minute you’re playing Neopets, the next you’re being conscripted into the second edition of the Holy Roman Empire. So annoying.
However, the internet has also done some truly excellent things, like allowing people to message each other online from across the world, when before you’d usually have to wait weeks in-between letters, leading to the most protracted game of Hangman imaginable.
It’s letters that also could have killed your PS4, though.
Back in 2018, PS4 users started sharing reports that their PS4s were getting bricked after they read messages that said “Juegas” and then a strange symbol that the PS4’s chat feature couldn’t register. We’re not sure whether it’s the symbol or Juegas, which means “you play” in Spanish, alongside the symbol that was the problem here, but it was a pretty potent weapon in the hands of griefers and poor losers.
As a result, players were reporting their consoles getting bricked with them unable to play anything, though really they were just getting stuck in a crash loop.
What’s wild about this is that this wasn’t even the work of hackers, as anyone could send anyone this message, meaning that multiplayer matches against toxic players could have pretty disastrous consequences.
Turning your messages completely off was a workaround for this issue, before Sony fixed it a day or two after the issue started getting widespread, and then everything in the multiplayer gaming world was completely fine until every game became a total sweatfest forever thanks to cross-play with PC.
I do wish someone had sent me Spanish gibberish when I was sinking those two thousand hours into Fortnite, though.
3. Concords Before Concord
As well as just generally not being the Xbox One, one of the reasons why the PS4 was such a major success was its wide array of exclusives you couldn’t play anywhere else. The console has arguably the greatest slate of exclusive games for PlayStation hardware, ever.
However, not every PS4 exclusive was a winner, and that applies doubly to its multiplayer games. Concord was far from the first PlayStation IP that struggled to hit the “multi” part in “multiplayer,” and I reckon it’s a pretty safe bet that you haven’t heard of all of these.
Maybe the most famous example is Driveclub, a really massively underrated driving game that didn’t deserve to get delisted six years after launch in 2020 due to the usual licensing shenanigans, though you can still play its single player content offline.
One of the more interesting multiplayer failures on PS4 is Drawn to Death, a digital-only third-person shooter designed to look like a teenager’s notebook come to life. Helmed by David Jaffe, he of God of War and complaining online fame, Drawn to Death struggled to get many players in 2017 despite being included with PlayStation Plus, and was then delisted in all regions by early 2019. Jaffe hasn’t made anything since.
The story of Kill Strain is a more bizarre one, especially considering it was developed by some of the same people who made Drawn to Death. After being unveiled in late 2014, it would take until mid-2016 for this “free-to-play top down twin stick shooter MOBA” in which a team of mutants tries to convert two other teams into more mutants, and if that sounds cool, believe me, playing it really wasn’t.
Kill Strain completely failed to get anywhere before being delisted in late 2017, with its developers, San Diego Studio, now consigned to the MLB content mines for the rest of time. Weirdly, the game was actually supposed to be taken offline in July 2017, but it seems somebody just forgot and it limped along until December before finally being killed strained.
Lastly, just a quick shout out to Hardware: Rivals and Guns Up! (which also came to Steam), two first-party multiplayer games that had their fans but couldn’t break out big and so were delisted in 2021 and 2023 respectively.
Sounds like the exact kind of success rate you’d want to build your next generation around, right?
4.The Knack Expanded Universe
It’s time for us all to come together, stop the jokes, and admit that Knack 1 and 2 were basically the Croc of the PlayStation 4 era, and if that weird little goober can get a lot of unironic love, so can the man made of the shapes from the greatest internet video of all time.
Directed by Mark Cerny, the man whose face you probably saw moments before disaster, Knack was a family friendly platformer that Sony was trying to pitch as the eighth generation’s Crash Bandicoot.
Unfortunately, Knack wasn’t exactly loved at release due to the deeply unsettling character designs, basic gameplay, and barely existent story, though it did sell enough to get a sequel, Knack II, which released in 2017 and was unironically a pretty good, pretty nice game.
It’s clear that Sony really wanted you to fall in love with the shape of, uh, Knack, though, as they had a fairly big multimedia push for him.
Not only did Sony try to do a Knack Attack in China with Knack’s Adventure, a localised version of the game that launched alongside the PS4 in China in 2015, but there was even Knack’s Quest for mobile devices, which was a match-three puzzle game that allowed you to unlock Relics within the full fat Knack — pretty neat! Unfortunately, the game was delisted from both iOS and Android in 2018.
There have actually been quite a few PlayStation IPs that had the not-at-all-forced mobile treatment, including Uncharted: Fortune Hunter, another kinda forgettable puzzle game, and God of War: Mimir’s Vision, an augmented reality game that took you through the map of the 2018 game.
By the way, this might be fixed by the time this comes out, but Google “God of War mobile game” and you might have a very funny first result to check out. I’ll say no more.
5.Cooking Up One Confusing Meal
Have you ever heard that Milkshake Duck thing, where it’s like we regret to inform you but the thing you thought was pure and innocent is actually just an asset in a capitalist war? I might be misremembering it a bit, but it basically describes the sad story of Cooking Mama: Cookstar.
For those who aren’t that well versed in the lore of Cooking Mama, the series started life and is best known for its widely beloved Nintendo DS titles stretching all the way back to 2006. Cooking Mama Cookstar released initially in March 2020 for Switch, which really should have been a sign, and then somewhat surprisingly for PS4 in March 2021, making it the first Cooking Mama game to release outside of the Nintendo ecosystem.
But it really shouldn’t have been released at all. And not just because it’s the worst Cooking Mama game ever and a pretty shameless flip for licensing reasons.
Basically, the game was only briefly released on Switch before it was taken down, as the people who actually own Cooking Mama, Office Create, said that the publisher, Planet Entertainment, had no right to release the game, as they released the game after their license had been terminated, opening up legal proceedings against Planet.
Despite this, Planet Entertainment would plow ahead with releasing the game again in 2021 on both PS4 and Switch, before late November 2022 when the IP owners, Office Create, would win against Planet, and Cooking Mama Cookstar was withdrawn from sale everywhere.
Only slightly perturbed, Planet would then again release Cooking Mama Cookstar, but this time with a lot of changes as Yum Yum Cookstar for PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One.
Nile Rodgers, who played guitar on one of the sounds of the summer, being the music producer on this deeply unsuccessful conversion isn’t even the wildest sub-story to come out of this all.
There were rumours of Cookstar being a crypto mining exercise that started circulating shortly after its release, but the developers, 1st Playable, said that this was never implemented and the blockchain stuff was only a concept.
The fact that it was even thought of being included in a game about a nice woman making you some eggs should tell you everything you need to know about this project.
6. Battery Is Not Here to Stay
Nothing is truly futureproof. Even the platform you’re watching this on right now could disappear if billionaires get bored. But it seems like Sony has always struggled with gazing into a crystal ball when it comes to their hardware.
As well as the PS3 having noted backwards compatibility problems and a leap year issue that you can check out more about in our PS3 facts video, the PlayStation 4 also looked like it might have a problem that was a bit of a ticking time bomb. Literally.
Well, not literally, as there was no bomb (boring), but it looked like there was going to be a time when the PlayStation 4’s internal clock was going to cause its games to become unplayable.
Basically, reports started circulating in early 2021 that when the internal clock CMOS batteries for the console died, which can take anywhere from 10 to 20 years, your PS4 wouldn’t be able to check the time with PlayStation Network, rendering it unplayable. This even applied to physical games, as your system needs to check in with PSN to confirm the time is correct.
For a frame of reference: this is kind of like the batteries on your Pokémon Game Boy carts dying out, except instead of your Pidgey called TITS simply being wiped from existence, you would never be able to find another Pidgey and call him BUTTS instead.
Luckily, it seems like Sony were aware of this significant design oversight, and quietly included a fix for the issue in the 9.00 firmware update released in September 2021.
It’s worth bearing in mind that this CMOS issue does also affect PlayStation 3 consoles, but only for downloaded games. Will it be a nightmare when Sony does finally pull PSN support for PS3, though? Only time will tell.
7. God of Whatsername
I often think about those people who called their baby daughters Khaleesi or Daenerys at the height of Game of Thrones hysteria, and I wonder if those children are consciously aware enough to resent them for at least a little bit for it.
Those Turok babies surely have to be psychopaths by now, right?
Pop culture baby names aren’t anything new, and they aren’t going to go anywhere as long as people love stuff and things maybe a bit too much, and there’s been no shortage of PlayStation 4 icons no doubt being confusingly read out by priests across the world during christenings.
According to The Bump, Kratos has been a steadily popular name since the first game’s release, seeing particular, um, bumps for the release of God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, though it’s only the 5345th most popular name in total in the US.
However, it’s Atreus that has by far been the most popular of the two, with it being the 457th most popular boy name in 2023.
Elsewhere, Aloy has become only the 6912th most popular girl name since Zero Dawn released, though it did jump 78 places Aloy after the release of Forbidden West. Somebody must have really been happy with their Platinum trophy, huh?
A lot of other PS4 icons, like Joel, Ellie, Nathan, Jin and Deacon have names that were either already pretty common or haven’t really changed in popularity, and unfortunately there’s no evidence for babies called Gran Turismo Sport. Shame.
However, while it’s not a PlayStation exclusive, it’s worth noting the impact Red Dead Redemption 2 seems to have had on the name “Arthur,” with it now being the 128th most popular boy name despite it falling out of fashion around 2010.
Make a baby or play through the Guarma section again. Tough choice.
8. Not Rated At All, Actually
Digital storefronts are an absolute mess right now across all three consoles, and not enough is being said about it. I’m not sure when proper curation went away and everything started looking like page 45 of Steam’s most recent releases, but from the AI generated slop to the endless rip-offs of popular games, it’s one of the main reasons why I barely even bother to look at digital stores anymore.
And there’s a patient zero for all of this. Sort of. By that I mean the first time when I noticed how bad quality control was slipping.
1000 Top Rated from the developers at Top Rated (check out the egos on these guys) was released digitally for PS4 on June 17, 2017, with its main selling point being that you could earn its Platinum trophy in under an hour.
Now, cheap Platinums are nothing new for the PlayStation Store. You might immediately think of My Name is Mayo, the arguable granddaddy of them all, but at least that had a little bit of thought put into it. Here, it’s just a paid Platinum. I mean, it said as such in the game’s description.
It took one single day for Sony to remove 1000 Top Rated from sale on June 18, 2017, as games cannot outright say they are paid Platinums on the PlayStation Store.
Top Rated, clearly bothered by Sony having standards, would then re-release 1000 Top Rated to the European PlayStation Store as Slyde, which has the distinction of providing the world’s fastest Platinum trophy in under a minute for less than a couple of quid.
You’d have to be a really sick individual to have this Plat.
9. We Could Be Heroes, Just For One Download
It’s hard to remember a time when a superhero show of some kind wasn’t airing on TV. The Boys is probably the biggest one ever, with Invincible also a banger when they make more than 6 episodes a year. There’s also whatever garbage Netflix likes to churn out, but don’t worry about that.
The origin for the modern wave of superhero shows is arguably Heroes, the ultimate “one good season” series if ever there was one. Seemingly noticing a gap in the market after everything but Season 1 so remarkably shit the bed, as well as the MCU kicking into full juggernaut gear, Sony plowed ahead with an adaptation of Brain Michael Bendis’ Powers in 2015.
You’re probably beginning to remember this now.
The show, which was originally planned as a movie way back in 2001, revolves around the investigation of superhuman crimes, with the always brilliant Sharlto Copley in the lead role. While it was envisioned for FX, Sony Picture Television had the very wild idea of making the show entirely exclusive to PlayStation Plus subscribers for a lot of English speaking territories, except for the first episode that would also be available on YouTube.
Thanks to a really terribly done rollout for both PS4 and PS3 subscribers, a lot of players were very confused why exactly they had this random superhero show in their library, but thankfully it didn’t do a U2 and force its way onto your hard drive like that Ace Ventura scene. Its first season did also come to Crackle for a time.
The show received pretty middling reviews, but did get picked up for a second season. However, it wasn’t quite powerful enough, and the show was canceled in August 2016. You can check out all 20 episodes nowadays by buying it to stream on places like Amazon. Its first season did also get a pretty wide DVD release, but its second season is very much a collector’s item.
10. The One True PS4 Exclusive
The PlayStation 5 is the first Sony console since the PS3 to offer backwards compatibility with the prior generation, though the PS3 only did so for the first handful of models. However, there are a handful of PS4 games that just straight up don’t work on the PS5, and one of those non-compatible games is actually the last true PS4 exclusive still standing.
Yes, if we’re being technical and boring, backwards compatibility does not mean that a PS4 game magically becomes a PS5 game. However, the fact that a game made exclusively for a Sony initiative does not work on a Sony console is pretty damn fascinating. We’re not including Afro Samurai 2 in this, which can’t be bought anymore anyway for fair reasons.
You might remember PlayLink, Sony’s short-lived project to bring mobile phones into multiplayer gaming in the living room. Look, I liked it. It was fun. It’s a pretty good idea in principle, as you don’t need four separate DualShocks to play, and your mum doesn’t need to be reminded every six seconds what R3 is.
Well, one of those PlayLink games was Just Deal With It!, a kinda fun but shamelessly half arsed card party game where you play things like poker, blackjack, and more. You might have already figured out why this really didn’t grab a lot of people’s attention, with the free app from the Android Play Store only being downloaded 10,000 times by around November 202. That’s not good when you remember that each person who wants to play this party game has to download this app.
You may be wondering how many downloads the app has reached in 2024, but here’s the thing: the app was removed from all stores, though you can still buy the game digitally on PS4 and download the APK online and get the app that way. It’s still playable with a few workarounds, and while it is fun, is it worth downloading some files from shady sites and digging out the PS4?
11. Moving Until Dawn
Sony went a bit cuckoo bananas for a minute there back in the PlayStation 3’s life cycle, following up with the success of the Slim with the most blatant attempt to cash in on the Wii’s casual market imaginable — until the Kinect would come out three months later.
While the Move would have its fans, Dead Space Extraction was pretty fun, you won’t really find anyone that was crazy about it. But what is crazy is the origins for one of the best one-time PS4 exclusives: Until Dawn.
Yes, the now PS5 and PC game for easy money reasons originally started out life as a Move exclusive on PS3 that would cater to younger horror fans, with players using the Move controller to point their flashlight from a first-person perspective, solve puzzles, and even fire guns.
That sounds pretty different to the finished product, but the game actually started life under different developers, not Supermassive Games. The now defunct London Studio were the ones who started Until Dawn off in 2008. Rest in peace, London Studio, me and the other sixteen players loved Blood and Truth.
Following tester feedback, the Move requirement was mercifully dropped from Until Dawn and Supermassive made it more catered towards audiences who didn’t mind watching people get folded in half, while taking inspiration from the likes of Heavy Rain to turn it into more of an interactive movie.
Until Dawn was also moved from the PlayStation 3 to launch for the PlayStation 4 in 2015, with a lot of the original actors also getting recast for more famous people, like the girl from Powers.
12. Deep and Wild
I have two pretty promising exclusives that vanished into the air that I’m not too sure you’ll remember.
The first is Deep Down, a Capcom game that was actually showcased at the February 2013 PlayStation Meeting where the PS4 was also unveiled the first time. It wasn’t the first PS4 game ever shown off, as I believe that is actually Knack. Callback! Callknack?
Anyway, the short footage showed off a game that looked a bit like Dark Souls mixed with Capcom’s own Dragon’s Dogma, and sees a knight doing knight stuff in a dungeon against a wyvern. I am also absolutely certain that we had a Killzone 3 trailer situation here, as the footage shown still looks better than most PS5 games and has that pre-rendered look to it.
That might be why the game never came out.
Deep Down was revealed to be planned as free-to-play later in 2013, with a public beta in 2014 that never came to pass. That’s just about all that we’ve ever heard about Deep Down, with Shawn Layden in 2021 saying he had no idea what happened to it.
The second PS4 exclusive that disappeared forever was Michel Ancel’s Wild, which was announced in 2014 before its cancellation was belatedly, still sort of unofficially announced just this year after Ancel left the games industry in 2020.
A survival game in which players would use animals in order to fight with other tribes across procedurally generated territory, Wild looked like a very ambitious open world game, and it was really just too ambitious to ever come out. They wanted you to be able to play as an ant.
What is this, a video game with ants–oh, uh, nevermind.
13. The PS4 Saved Someone’s Life
While some games can sometimes get you out of a bad rut, it’s not often that you can say that gaming physically saved your life.
Well, that was the case for a young girl in Japan in September 2020 when she used her PlayStation 4 to get away from her abductor.
According to NHK News and translated by Push Square, the girl travelled to Tokyo to meet her much older male pen pal, who then abducted her and took her back to his home in Yokohama.
The girl was held there for a month, with her eventually being able to use her captor’s PS4 to send emails to the police while he wasn’t home. The police were eventually able to track her down, thankfully unharmed.
What’s crazier about this is that if this terrible story had happened just a few months later and her abductor had upgraded to a PS5 when the PS5 launched worldwide in November 2020, she wouldn’t have been able to send emails at all, as the PS5 doesn’t have a built-in browser.
One that’s easy to access without some dumb workaround, that is.
14. Quite the Impact
Live service games. You know them, you tolerate them, you probably look over at them uncaring and go back to playing Metal Gear Solid 2 like any sane adult would. But it’s undeniable that there’s a massive audience for those games these days, with that market share only growing more and more.
One of the biggest games in that sphere is the Chinese-developed Genshin Impact, a free-to-play action RPG with pretty horrendous monetisation schemes. And also waifus. Wait, the waifus are the monetisation? Modern gaming is so fun, isn’t it?
While Genshin Impact is monstrously popular and profitable these days, launching a series of similar games from miHoYo that I simply cannot care about no matter how many times Keighley takes a bribe to put one of them in his shows, it’s hard to imagine it starting off on a worse foot.
You see, when Genshin Impact was first revealed, people were mad. Mad enough to smash their PlayStation 4s in protest.
During ChinaJoy 2019, Genshin Impact was revealed for the first time, and was immediately followed by a lot of comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Accusations of plagiarism were rife at the event, with players even holding their Switch units aloft like it was some forgotten scene from The Hunger Games, and a certain individual even destroyed their PS4. That will teach…someone…something?
Genshin Impact no doubt borrows some ideas from Breath of the Wild, but The Legend of Zelda doesn’t let you buy 18 different variants of Princess Zelda that you can enter into a digital parasocial relationship with, so what’s really the more important game here?
15. Sekirgo Get This PS4 Pro
The PS4 is one nice looking console. Pointy in all the right places, with angles for days.
The point here is that the PlayStation 4’s basic design is one that’s pretty agreeable, but it really is nothing flashy. Maybe Sony went the other way too much when they designed the PS5, which really to me has always had huge Tom Cruise Oblivion energy in a way that I cannot fully explain, but you could only really improve it with some blood, kanji, and a rope.
Oh, okay, someone did do that. Fair enough.
This custom wooden PS4 Pro was designed for a European retailer by the name of Game Mania, with 40 of them being produced to be given away in sweepstakes for pre-ordering the game in the Netherlands and Belgium, with this special Pro also being given away by EB Games Australia for, um, Australians, and allegedly on the official Sekiro website just for South African players, but I’ve had trouble authentically
The Japanese text on the console translates to Wolf, one of the names for the game’s protagonist, and the console also comes with a DualShock 4 with Sekiro branding. The PS4 Pro is made of a bamboo exterior, with a tissue-like paper splattered in blood.
It’s certainly one of the coolest consoles ever made, but $80,000 AUD cool? That’s around $54,000 USD/ £41,000. We appreciate the effort from this seller back in 2019, but as far as we can tell this PS4 Pro has never been sold since this giveaway.
We will give you ten quid. Alright, twenty.
READ NEXT: 15 Nintendo Wii Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
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