Here’s something that’ll make you rub your eyes. A scruffy armored figure trudges up some stairs toward a heavy metal portal. He bends to grasp the door from its base, because—inexplicably—it opens by rolling upwards like the entrance to some weird medieval garage. Beyond the threshold is an outdoor environment dominated by a colossal, glowing tree—and just outside is a weird dude in a white mask who makes fun of the warrior for being “maidenless.” Yep, it’s Elden Ring, but wait… is that a PS1?
This three-scene demo is the work of someone who goes by the name 2009Aero, who has barreled onto YouTube with a rapid series of similar uploads—his previous hits include “I built Dark Souls on a real Nintendo 64” and “I built Pokemon in TempleOS.” (W/r/t the latter, if you’re not familiar with TempleOS and its author Terry A. Davis, welcome to the sad and fascinating rabbit hole that’s going to occupy the rest of your day.)
This Elden Ring demo includes three functioning scenes, and honestly it feels like absolute sorcery. So how does one even begin to get Elden Ring running on a PS1? Well, as 2009Aero explains, you don’t start with Elden Ring. Instead, he began with Minecraft—and, specifically, a previous project that involved getting that game running on a PS1. Using that port as a framework, he started with getting the environment to look, y’know, less like Minecraft and adding character models from some drastically downsampled but still recognizable Elden Ring asset. Even getting the Tarnished moving around a simplified version of Limgrave required aggressive culling of anything not directly visible to the player from memory, and it feels like a miracle that one of the parts of the game he got working was Godfrey’s boss fight.
There are some intriguing tidbits here: for example, it’s interesting to see that one of the primary obstacles he encountered was porting Elden Ring’s sound to the PS1, rather than, say, the graphics. It’s also jarring to be reminded just how limited the console’s hardware was: its 32-bit CPU ran at 33MHz, which is slower than the 386DX-based system that I built (and was very proud of myself for doing so) several years earlier. Clearly, it doesn’t always work to make a direct comparison between a general purpose PC and a dedicated games console, but the point is that the PS1 wasn’t cutting-edge hardware in 1994, and it was verging on antique by the time the PS2 rolled around six years later.
This all makes 2009Aero’s achievement all the more impressive. Sadly, this is not the entire game, because of course it isn’t: the description for the video notes, amusingly, that “Elden Ring on PS1 would have taken over 10 CDs”, a sentence in which the word “over” is really putting in some work. Still, the three scenes that 2009Aero created are playable, and not just on an emulator: he actually burns his creation to a CD and boots it up on a real PS1, at which point he has his ass handed to him by Godfrey’s second phase. (It’s OK, 2009Aero—we’ve all been there.) As a feat of technical wizardry, this is really impressive, and we look forward to his next video, which rumor has it is entitled “I built Cyberpunk 2077 on a small bag of nectarines.”
