A modder has finally jailbroken the PS5, but there’s a big catch

By Cristina Alexander October 3, 2022

A modder has finally jailbroken the PlayStation 5 in order to download an old game that’s unavailable on the system. But trying to play that game is an entirely different story.

PlayStation modder SpecterDev shared an experimental IPV6 kernel exploit for the PS5 on Twitter last night. In case you’re not sure what jailbreaking is, it’s a hacking technique that’s often done on smartphones and other electronic devices to unlock debug menus and allow the use of software not supported by current firmware.

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This particular jailbreak code is experimental because it requires a WebKit vulnerability as an entry point, and it only works on PS5 consoles running version 4.03 or older — at least 30% of the time. The code only gives read/write access, and not the ability to execute any old game you attempt to install.

Lance McDonald, another modder, tweeted a video showing exactly how the PS5 jailbreak works. As you can see in the video below, he used the code to install the lost Silent Hills demo P.T. It was a success, but he wasn’t able to play it. In a response to another Twitter user asking if people will be able to bring their saved P.T. demos to the PS5, McDonald said, “I need to work out how to destroy the blacklist/whitelist for PS4 games.”

It's… beautiful.

The PlayStation 5 has been jailbroken. pic.twitter.com/54fvBGoQGw

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) October 3, 2022

P.T. was a free demo that Konami shadow-dropped on the PlayStation Store in 2014, giving fans a teaser into Silent Hills, which was being developed by Hideo Kojima in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro. Finding out what the game was about required players to solve various cryptic puzzles, which was a quirky way to market the game, but still managed to garner a dedicated fan base. In 2015, Silent Hills was suddenly canceled, prompting Konami to delist P.T. from the PS Store. Fans have been struggling to bring the demo back ever since.

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