PlayStation Stars Brings Back The PS1 Tech Demo Dinosaur As A Digital Collectible

Referencing the famous T. Rex tech demo for the original PlayStation.

New loyalty program PlayStation Stars launched in Asia this week, and will roll out to Europe and US fairly soon, and those playing in Asian countries such as Japan have given us a glimpse into how Stars will operate.

PlayStation Stars is a free to join service that rewards users for completing a variety of campaigns and activities. Since it’s October, a new campaign has kicked off in Asia where the service is alreadly live, and the reward for it calls back to a classic piece of PlayStation history (via PlayStation fanatic).

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This October campaign for PlayStation Stars is a simple one, users only need to play either a PS4 or PS5 game. For doing so, PlayStation Stars rewards you with a digital collectible, the ‘PlayStation Tech Demo Tyrannosaurus Rex’.

Veteran PlayStation owners will recall that the original PlayStation launched with a tech demo that allowed players to see a moving, fully three-dimensional T. Rex via their console on the TV. For the time, it was considered fairly impressive to have such seamless 3D graphics and with the ability to move the camera around the polygonal model too. Now PlayStation Stars is celebrating that history in the form of this digital collectible.

That’s not all. It looks like the little digital figurine is also making a reference to the Sly Cooper series as its little T.Rex arms are holding a cane that is the spitting image of the one the furry platformer star holds. So you’re getting two callbacks for the price of one. The caption for the collectible is rather comical too, but we’ll leave that one unsaid so as not to spoil the surprise.

Sony has referenced the famous tech demo before. In the pack-in game for the PS5, Astro’s Playroom, the T. Rex makes an appearance too, among other icons in PlayStation’s history. The pack-in game is a wonderfully made tribute to PlayStation’s history, and now PlayStation Stars looks to tap into the same vein. Whether the loyalty program will be as joyous as that game remains to be seen, however, especially as criticisms have been made of it already regarding its approach to customer service.

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