Sony – of PlayStation fame – has patented a rewind button for gaming controllers that could forever change the way you interact with single-player games, assuming the feature ever sees the light of day. Taking a page out of the old Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time playbook, the feature would allow players to bookmark key moments throughout the game.
The system, as detailed in the patent titled “GAMEPLAY REWIND WITH USER TRIGGERED BOOKMARKS,” will allow players to rewind, fast-forward, or replay recent botched moments by essentially allowing them to create a save state anywhere they want.
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According to the patent, the feature would be activated by pressing a button on the controller. It’s designed to work with various types of games, but is limited to single-player experiences, otherwise a) that would be cheating, but b) it also sounds next to impossible to pull off in an environment with synchronized gameplay states. The patent uses the word “universal” quite a bit, which likely hints at its functionality across several types of single-player games, but not all games.
The ability to rewind time has become a staple of the gaming world, but usually on a software level. Past games, like the aforementioned Prince of Persia and The Sands of Time, have included rewind features to allow players to instantly fix a mistake or alter the state of the game environment. What Sony wants to implement sounds like it takes some cues from the world of emulators.
The rewind feature sounds like it could open up gaming to a whole new subset of folks who want to play for leisure and not necessarily for the challenge. Inevitably, people are going bring up FromSoft games and the entire Soulsborne genre that it birthed, and the rest of us will be subjected to another round of obnoxious debates that seem to happen once or twice a year on social media like clockwork.
Give me a real-life fast-forward button so I can zip right through all that bullshit.
