Sony Interactive Entertainment reportedly filed a recent patent for what appears to be a new gaming console, complete with drawings indicating it will have a radical design featuring a V-shaped indent on top.
The ‘leak’ comes to us from Let’s Go Digital, and the documents appear to be real. But don’t get too excited: this is almost certainly not going to be the final look of the actual PlayStation 5 console. Chances are, this is one of the concepts for the PlayStation 5 developer’s kit. Dev kits are usually bulkier and have more ports than the finished product because, at this stage, there’s little reason for engineers to concern themselves with aesthetics.
This design, which the patent attributes to Sony Director of Engineering Yasuhiro Ootori, has a giant V on top of it though. I’m guessing it wasn’t put there to accommodate specific hardware. And that begs the question: Why would a top engineer at Sony go through the trouble of coming up with a fancy design for a dev kit?
The easy answer is that he felt like it. When you’re the boss you can do stuff like that. Maybe he just liked the shape – perhaps he was inspired by the noble duck and its penchant for flying in a mighty “V” formation. But I’m going to toss one right at you from way out in left field: Sony will eschew Arabic numerals going forth and rebrand its new console as the PlayStation V. Boom. Did I just blow your mind?
As my colleague Rachel Kaser pointed out to me earlier today: It wouldn’t be the first time Sony’s put the letter V in a console name. There’s the PlayStation Vita. Everyone knows that “vita” is Italian for “life.” And Italy is where is Rome is at (source: Reddit) — ergo Roman numerals. I rest my case.
Do with this wild conjecture what you will. In the mean time, check out these super-cool images of previous PlayStation dev kits curated by @TheYadda on Twitter (hat tip).
We’ve reached out to Sony with our nonsense, we’ll let you know if anyone responds.
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