Early buyers of the Vita currently only have direct access to some of their old PSP/Minis games and absolutely no access to their PS1 titles. While we've been told that work is progressing quite well on boosting the PSP compatibility list, very little has been said about PlayStation classics.
The official EU PlayStation blog tweeted earlier this week that the feature would be patched in "soon," although there weren't any specifics. The truth of the matter, though, seems to be that Sony themselves just don't know. Shuhei Yoshida, interviewed by Wired, goes into a little detail on why we'll be waiting for a little while.
"The goal was, we get all PSP downloadable games to work on PS Vita, and the PS1 games to work on PS Vita. From a PSP emu standpoint, we are almost there. Ninety-plus percent of PSP PSN games are already on the Japanese store to download. And the team is focusing on getting the U.S. and European launch as good in terms of coverage of the PSP titles on the store. So that’s the focus. Because of that, we are really trying for a high percent of the PSP games to go on the PS Vita for launch in the U.S. and Europe. After that we will shift focus to get PS1 games on PS Vita. It’s still going to happen, but we cannot tell when. I’m hoping for sooner rather than later."
