50 Fun Facts About PlayStation 4

God of War's 2018 PS4 reboot moved Kratos out of Greek myth and into which mythology?

Norse mythology won out after the studio also weighed an Egyptian setting. Kratos swapped Mount Olympus for the wilds of ancient Scandinavia, with his son Atreus fighting at his side.

Which superhero's 2018 PS4 game became the fastest-selling first-party release in Sony's history?

Spider-Man sold 3.3 million copies in its first three days, narrowly beating a record set months earlier by God of War. Insomniac's game went on to pass 20 million copies on PS4.

Which new DualShock 4 button replaced Select and opened the PS4's screenshot and video tools?

Share let players scroll back through up to 60 minutes of recorded play to pick a clip or screenshot worth posting. Its neighbour, Options, took over from the old Start button.

Which game did Sony remove from the PlayStation Store for six months after a troubled launch on PS4?

Cyberpunk 2077 vanished from the store from December 2020 to June 2021 while its developer patched the console versions. Sony offered refunds to everyone who had bought it there.

Which type of disc did Sony drop support for on the PS4, though the PS3 played them?

Audio CDs will not play on a PS4, even though the PS1, PS2 and PS3 all handled them. The console does play films on Blu-ray and DVD.

Ghost of Tsushima's black-and-white mode, complete with film grain, honours which Japanese director?

Akira Kurosawa's estate gave the developers permission to use his name. The samurai films he directed, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo among them, were a major inspiration for the game.

The PS4 launched in North America in 2013 at $399, undercutting which rival console by $100?

Xbox One cost $499 at launch, and Sony pressed the advantage by promising no restrictions on reselling or trading PS4 discs.

Which crime game starring Michael, Franklin and Trevor became the best-selling game on PS4?

Grand Theft Auto V outsold every other game on the console, even though it had first come out on PS3 a year earlier. The upgraded version added a first-person view of Los Santos.

Which battle royale game was first to get PS4 cross-play with rival consoles in 2018?

Fortnite players had found that an account used on PS4 was locked out of other consoles, and the backlash helped change Sony's mind. Cross-play arrived in September 2018.

Battlefield 1, a 2016 hit on PS4, broke with the series by depicting which conflict?

World War I put bolt-action rifles, flamethrowers and poison gas in players' hands, in battles inspired by real historical events.

Which treasure hunter, voiced by Nolan North, takes a final bow in the PS4 best seller Uncharted 4?

Nathan Drake is coaxed out of retirement by a brother he believed dead, and the pair chase the lost treasure of the pirate Henry Avery. The studio set out to make it the last game in the series.

Which young hunter is the hero of Horizon Zero Dawn, a world ruled by animal-like machines?

Aloy scans the machines with an earpiece called a Focus, and she can hack some of them with her spear to ride as mounts. The game sold more than 19 million copies on PS4.

Which outlaw of the Van der Linde gang do players control for most of Red Dead Redemption 2?

Arthur Morgan carries the story through 1899, and only in the epilogue does control pass to John Marston, the hero of the first Red Dead Redemption.

In the PS4 hit Detroit: Become Human, Kara, Connor and Markus are all what kind of being?

Androids in the game begin to gain consciousness, and each lead reacts differently. Kara flees her owner, Markus fights to free others, and Connor is the police model sent to hunt them.

Which game, born from Blizzard's cancelled Titan, won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2016?

Overwatch beat Doom, Inside, Titanfall 2 and Uncharted 4 to the top prize, and Blizzard was named Best Studio on the same night.

Which actor plays the courier Sam Porter Bridges in Hideo Kojima's PS4 game Death Stranding?

Norman Reedus was the basis for the hero from the start. He was joined in the cast by Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux, with film director Guillermo del Toro lending his likeness.

The Last of Us Part II sends Ellie from Jackson, Wyoming to hunt for Abby in which city?

Seattle was studied on location by the game's artists, who analysed its architecture and vegetation and captured textures for the ruined city. Abby's militia is based there.

Which game created by Markus Persson reached PS4 in 2014 in an edition built by 4J Studios?

Minecraft worlds on PS4 could be 36 times larger than they were on PS3. The game had been planned for the console's launch but slipped to September 2014.

The Witcher 3, a PS4 hit based on Andrzej Sapkowski's novels, was made by a studio in which country?

Poland is home to the studio, which is based in Warsaw and started out translating other companies' games into Polish.

Which studio made both Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Remastered, two of the PS4's biggest sellers?

Naughty Dog saw both games pass 18 million copies on PS4. Its 2020 sequel to the second of them became the console's fastest-selling exclusive, with four million sold in a weekend.

Which PS4 game by Bend Studio follows biker Deacon St. John through an Oregon overrun by Freakers?

Days Gone lets its zombie-like Freakers gather into a single huge horde that chases Deacon down. Central Oregon was chosen for its varied terrain, and the game sold over seven million copies on PS4.

Which PS4 exclusive by FromSoftware sends a Hunter through Yharnam, a Gothic city gripped by plague?

Bloodborne took its mood from the horror of Lovecraft and Bram Stoker, and its streets from real architecture in Romania and the Czech Republic.

Which 2016 PS4 game reimagined a 2002 platformer to tie in with a film of the same name?

Ratchet & Clank was held back from 2015 so that it could launch alongside the film, and it drew far better reviews than the film did. It sold about seven million copies on PS4.

Which PS4 game, announced for PS3 in 2009, pairs a boy with a giant creature called Trico?

The Last Guardian was meant to arrive in 2011, but delays and hardware trouble pushed it onto PS4, and many people doubted it would ever be released.

Which 2016 space game by Hello Games generates a universe of more than 18 quintillion planets?

No Man's Sky builds every planet by procedural generation, so each world has an ecosystem of plants and animals that no designer placed by hand.

Which 2016 Call of Duty game moved the fighting into space and drew a flood of YouTube dislikes?

Infinite Warfare's reveal trailer became the second-most disliked video on YouTube at the time, a backlash commentators put down to fans tired of futuristic settings.

Which PS4 racing game hosted online championships certified by the FIA, motorsport's governing body?

Gran Turismo Sport was also the first game in its series to include Porsche cars, which became possible once a rival publisher's exclusive licence had expired.

Which PS4 game from the console's first months gives Delsin Rowe powers drawn from smoke and neon?

Infamous Second Son lets players push its hero towards good or evil through the choices they make. It arrived in March 2014, four months after the console itself.

Which actor plays Josh in the PS4 horror game Until Dawn, alongside Hayden Panettiere?

Rami Malek gave both his voice and a motion-capture performance, in a game whose butterfly effect system lets any of its eight leads die.

Which hero of LittleBigPlanet 3 is joined on PS4 by new friends OddSock, Toggle and Swoop?

Sackboy can be outrun by OddSock, a dog-like friend who is also able to wall-jump. Toggle switches between a large, heavy form and a small, light one.

Final Fantasy VII Remake has Cloud Strife fighting the Shinra company in which sprawling city?

Midgar fills only the opening section of the original game, which the remake stretches into a full-length adventure of its own. Shinra powers the city by draining the planet's energy.

Which 1990s PlayStation mascot returned on PS4 in the N. Sane Trilogy, rebuilt by Vicarious Visions?

Crash Bandicoot had his first three games rebuilt almost from nothing, because the new team did not have the original source code and had to work from old 3D models instead.

Which 2015 Psyonix game took off after launching free to PlayStation Plus subscribers on PS4?

Rocket League drew more than 183,000 players within a week, enough to overwhelm its servers. It was a sequel to a PS3 game that the same studio had released in 2008.

Which studio launched Destiny in 2014, its first new console franchise since the Halo series?

Bungie made Destiny as the first game in a ten-year agreement with the publisher Activision. The two companies parted ways in 2019, and the studio went on publishing the game itself.

P.T., a free PS4 demo later pulled from the PlayStation Store, teased a game in which horror series?

Silent Hill was due a new entry from Hideo Kojima and the film-maker Guillermo del Toro. When the project was cancelled, the demo was removed and could no longer be reinstalled.

FighterZ, a 2018 fighting game from Arc System Works, is based on which anime and manga franchise?

Dragon Ball supplied the cast, and the last word of the title is pronounced as 'fighters'.

Which trophy, ranked above gold, does a PS4 player earn for unlocking every other trophy in a game?

Platinum is the fourth type of trophy, alongside bronze, silver and gold, which are handed out by how hard a feat is. Smaller games generally do not offer one at all.

Which lead architect of the PS4 hardware also directed Knack, one of its launch games?

Mark Cerny wanted Knack to suit seasoned players and people who had never held a controller alike. He later admitted that aiming at both may have led the game in the wrong direction.

Which chipmaker supplied the PS4's custom eight-core processor, replacing the PS3's Cell design?

AMD called the chip the most powerful of its kind that it had developed. Seven of the eight cores were left available for game makers to use.

PlayStation VR, the PS4's virtual reality headset, was known by which codename during development?

Project Morpheus was first shown at the 2014 Game Developers Conference. By then, a Sony engineer said, his team had been working on the headset for more than three years.

Which new feature on the DualShock 4 can detect two fingers at once and be pressed like a button?

A touchpad sits in the middle of the PS4 controller. A later revision added a stripe along its top edge so that the glow of the light bar could shine through.

The PS4 Pro, a more powerful model released in 2016, added support for games at which resolution?

4K arrived in the same refresh as a smaller model popularly known as the Slim. The original PS4 supported video standards only up to 1080p.

Which handheld console could stream PS4 games through Remote Play, at home or away?

PS Vita owners could carry on a PS4 game away from the television, and Sony said it hoped to make every PS4 game playable on the handheld.

Orbis OS, the operating system that runs the PS4, is built on which open-source system?

FreeBSD 9 was customised to make it. The name Orbis was also given to the development kits, modified PCs that Sony began sending to game studios in 2012.

Which publisher released the Jeopardy! video game for PS4 in 2017?

Ubisoft released its Jeopardy! game in November 2017, and a Wheel of Fortune game arrived from the same publisher that week.

Which PS4 fighting game stages the final battle between Heihachi Mishima and his son Kazuya?

Tekken 7 tells its story through a reporter who is investigating the Mishima family's corporate empire.

Which 2016 role-playing game follows the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, vigilante students in Tokyo?

Persona 5 came out in Japan in September 2016 and reached the rest of the world the following April. Its hero is a high school student known by the codename Joker.

Which 2016 mystery game has Henry patrolling a Wyoming forest and talking by radio to Delilah?

Firewatch makes Henry a lookout in Shoshone National Forest, where his supervisor Delilah reaches him by walkie-talkie as a years-old mystery unfolds. It reached PS4 in February 2016.

Sony's PlayLink party games for PS4, such as the quiz Knowledge is Power, are controlled with what?

Smartphones stood in for controllers through companion apps, an idea Sony revealed at E3 2017. The range also included That's You and Hidden Agenda.

Which monster slayer for hire searches for his adopted daughter Ciri in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt?

Geralt of Rivia belongs to the order of Witchers, and his daughter is on the run from the Wild Hunt that gives the game its subtitle.