Anyone who has owned a PlayStation since the original launched, will probably have played a Psygnosis game (whether they know it or not). The defunct, Sony-owned game developer (latterly known as Studio Liverpool, after the city in which the founders based it) hasn’t released a game for quite some time, yet Sony has renewed the trademark for the brand.
But why? Let’s find out…
Sony Renews Psygnosis Trademarks
The iconic chrome effect Psygnosis lettering and owl logo are likely to send flutters of nostalgia through any gamer’s stomach. Representing the brand owned by Sony, we associate both trademarks with some of the best games we have seen since… well… gaming began.
Now, it transpires, Sony has re-registered the trademarks for the Psygnosis brand, including the name and the logos. According to Twitter user Roberto Serrano’s tweet, Sony Interactive Entertainment is the owner of the trademarks.
This is likely just to keep other people from using the logo to represent their own brand, or using the name and publishing games under pretense. However, there could be other reasons for this trademark renewal…
Why Might Sony Have Renewed the Psygnosis Trademarks?
There are two other potential reasons Sony has renewed the Psygnosis name and logo.
First, consider that Sony may have plans to reignite the brand, and for Studio Liverpool to once again become Psygnosis. Sure, this sounds like the chittering of a writer in the throes of nostalgia, but we can dream, can we not?
Imagine what the devs—who brought us WipeOut, Colony Wars, and Adventures of Alundra on the PlayStation—could do with today’s technology. If Sony did bring Psygnosis back like a phoenix from the ashes, we could end up with some seriously amazing IP littering our PS5 hard drives.
However, the second (and also more plausible) inference is that Sony is renewing the trademarks because of the games it plans to include on the rumored PlayStation Spartacus service.
Spartacus, if we are to believe the rumors, looks like it will feature games from every generation of PlayStation, from the OG PS1, through to the PS4. This makes sense, since we moot it to be Sony’s answer to Game Pass, and Game Pass features Xbox games from all generations.
So, if this is the case, and Sony plans on offering games from former consoles, then Psygnosis will have developed some of these games, and the logos and brand name will appear in the opening credits of said games.
Thus, Sony has renewed the trademark in order to display it on Spartacus’ backwards compatible Psygnosis titles, such as the Destruction Derby and the Formula One games.
It is probably best not to get our hopes up, though. It is unlikely that Sony is bringing Psygnosis back although, thanks to Spartacus, we could once again play the Psygnosis games that made the original PlayStation (and those that followed) such a fantastic experience.
Is Sony Bringing Psygnosis Back?
Probably not, which is a very sad state of affairs. As mentioned, this is most likely to do with protecting the trademark than giving us all a new version of Lemmings on PlayStation VR2.
Sure, it could be something to do with Spartacus, but even with all the Psygnosis games in the world behind it, Sony will still have a hard time facing off against Microsoft’s Game Pass, particularly after all this Activision buyout chat.
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