Sony details plans for celebrating PlayStation’s 30th anniversary—and they’re pretty lame

Happy 30th birthday, PlayStation! Thank you for all of the great games and memories. Here are your awful gifts.

Sony has detailed what it plans to do for the 30th anniversary of PlayStation, and it doesn’t really inspire much excitement. The first new addition is whatever these things below are, which the company is calling Shapes of Play.

Shapes of Play: Battle is probably the coolest, described as “a board game where you can challenge a friend to line up four different shapes of the same color on the board to win.” Then there’s Shapes of Play: Create, which is just a set of magnetic blocks.

Finally, we have Shapes of Play: Recharge, which “lets you experience a new way to recharge between games, especially after that tough boss battle.” And that’s all they said about it. I don’t really know what it means, either. But all three different products will launch on PlayStation Direct in December.

If you’ve ever wanted to try Gran Turismo (and somehow haven’t over the past 30 years), you’re in luck, because My First GT is a free trial for Gran Turismo 7. It’ll be available to all PS5 and PS4 players some time this fall.

On Sept. 21 and 22, Sony will have free online multiplayer weekends for games like FC 24, NBA 2K25, and Modern Warfare 3, along with some esports tournaments. And basically, that’s all the company is doing for the 30th year of one of the most successful names in the gaming business.

Oh, and there are a couple of lame avatars players can earn for participating in said tournaments. Wow. Joy. Let’s hope the console’s 40th birthday is a bit more exciting than this one, because I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care for any of it. And I’ve owned every PlayStation console there’s been.

It feels like tomorrow’s release of Astro Bot is the real, deserved celebration of PlayStation. Check out our review of the game that we called “platforming perfection.”