By Blast along to your personal playlist
- by Sammy Barker
Recall the storefront’s first steps? The catalogue was tiny, so any fresh arrival instantly mattered.
A title still burned into our memory is Beat Hazard Ultra. It milked every multimedia muscle of the PS3, letting you import playlists and spawning twin-stick arenas that pulsed to whatever track you fed it.
Twelve years on, Cold Beam Games is finally parachuting the brand back onto PlayStation, with Beat Hazard Arcade landing on both PS5 and PS4.
It touches down on 24 September, squeezed into a launch calendar that’s sliding toward pure mayhem.
You’ll still be able to load your own MP3s via a USB drive as before, though the package also ships with 4½ hours of ready-made tunes for anyone who’d rather skip the curation.
A slick twist is that both enemy giants and your craft are sculpted from the sonic DNA of the chosen song, so the experience runs deeper than mere screen-wide strobing. Up to four players can pile onto the couch for local co-op carnage.
We quizzed the studio about Spotify integration, but it seems console restrictions keep that door locked for now.
Until then, cue the trailer above for a quick nostalgia jolt, and drop a comment below if you’ll be syncing your library all over again once the game pops back onto the PS Store.
[source youtube.com]
As Push Square’s Editor, Sammy has spent more than a decade and a half dissecting everything PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5. He’s a go-to voice on Sony’s first-party output and wider industry shifts, with additional obsessions spanning sports titles and sims. When bandwidth allows, he sinks into sprawling RPGs and shamelessly feeds the gacha abyss.