Sony's PlayStation 3 will play almost every PlayStation game, a senior IBM staffer has claimed. It's not clear how many PSOne titles won't play, but according to Tom Reeves, VP of semiconductor and technology services at IBM, even 40 of them was too high a number for Sony.

In an Electronic News interview, Reeves said: "Sony is very concerned about quality and backward compatibility. They want to get this right. They tested game after game after game. When there were about 40 PlayStation 1 games that didn’t work properly, that didn’t pass their criteria for quality."

Sony's PlayStation chief, Ken Kutaragi, first promised the PS3 would play PlayStation and PS2 games back in September 2003. However, how well the next-generation console will do so and across how many titles has always been open to question, especially once Microsoft shipped its Xbox 360 console, which still plays only a sub-set of original Xbox titles, using emulation software. As of June 2006, the 360 will play only 227 Xbox games, though ongoing updates to the emulation code regularly add more to the list. ®