Reebok Revives Three Mid-’90s Classics for the Sony PlayStation’s 30th

This week, Sony and Reebok debuted a limited edition three-shoe drop in honor of the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation’s release. The three original launch territories—Japan, the UK, and the USA—will each get its own distinctive silhouette to mark the occasion.

“I know the history of PlayStation and who they’ve collaborated with previously, and I hadn’t seen anything come from them from a sportswear brand in particular for a while,” Reebok’s global senior product marketing manager, Mubi Ali, says. “So I just reached out to the team here in the UK over LinkedIn to see if they were open for a conversation. It was as simple as that.” Once Ali met with all the various teams inside Sony, it “started to snowball from there.”

During those early discussions, Sony set an ambitious deadline for Reebok. They wanted everything to be done and ready to go for an announcement on September 29, which was when the PlayStation was released in the UK. That UK release was the last region release date for the console, meaning it was the latest they could have released the collection and still have it remain relevant to the 30th anniversary celebration. “From day one, we knew the collection had to spotlight the launch of the original PlayStation,” Jill Erb, Senior Director, Marketing Partnerships, Sony Interactive Entertainment, says over email. “We wanted to honor those unforgettable moments—fans lining up overnight, global excitement, the console that changed everything.”

“PlayStation came out in 1995, so what we wanted to do was reflect that within the shoe choices,” Ali says. The silhouettes they chose are each unique to a specific region: The InstaPump Fury 94 for Japan, the Pump Omni Zone II for the US (pictured below), and the Workout Plus for the UK. The Fury 94 was selected because it was “relevant for the PlayStation as it came out quite late in 1994 within other regions of the world.” The Club C was considered for the UK, but the brand ultimately felt that the Workout Plus was “synonymous” with the country in that period. Finally, there’s the US’s Pump Omni Zone II. “We wanted a basketball silhouette for the US,” says Ali. “A bunch of stuff came out during 1995, but none of them really fit what we really wanted to do and achieve.” Erb says, “Each shoe was picked carefully, connecting authentically to each market, either released the same year or culturally dominant at the time.”