Trophies are a part of PlayStation games nowadays with more than 10,000 games sporting the familiar feature, but not all PlayStation 3 games had them. As spotted by ResetEra, Sony submitted a patent at the end of November that looked into using a process of emulation to unlock Trophies on older titles that originally didn’t have the feature.
The patent describes how an emulation process could be triggered by “a client device” and would be used to detect whether requirements had been met to unlock one or more Trophies. If all of the requirements have been met, the process would then assign those Trophies to the player. The patent is specifically aimed at “previously released or sold video games”. Using current methods, developers of titles that didn’t have Trophies would have to modify their games to implement them. For many of the older titles, this is no longer possible, nor is it worth the time and money to do this. However, the new patent would remove the need for modifying the games.
PlayStation Trophies were first introduced in 2008 but they were far from commonplace. Unlike Microsoft’s policy where all Xbox Live games had to have achievements, Trophies were not mandatory in PlayStation titles until the next year, when all games submitted for certification after January 1, 2009 had to include them. Altogether, 275 of the titles from the first two years of the PlayStation 3’s lifespan don’t have trophies, as well a...