I still remember the spring of 2020 like it was a fever dream. Now that I am sitting here in 2026, with a backlog longer than a CVS receipt, those old PlayStation 4 release-date updates feel like a time capsule from a particularly strange era. COVID-19 was dominating the news cycle with all the subtlety of a rooster in a monastery, and practically every project in entertainment had to hit pause, pivot, or pray. So when PlayStation and Naughty Dog announced that The Last of Us Part II was sliding from May 29 to June 19, I was not exactly shocked. I was just trying to figure out whether my calendar had been replaced by a deck of tarot cards being reshuffled by a caffeinated octopus.

Then Ghost of Tsushima, a game I had mentally locked into June 26 like a bear trap, got pushed to July 17. A little under a month later, sure, but in pandemic time that felt like three lunar cycles. The whole release schedule had become less a plan and more an improv jazz session where everyone forgot the key signature.

What made these two delays notable, however, was that they were not the usual last-minute cancellations. Both games were still coming. They had new dates, and they were close. For PlayStation 4 owners, that was a lifeline, because the console was entering its golden-hour phase. The PlayStation 5 was already revving its engine for a holiday season launch, which meant The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima were shaping up to be the final swan songs for the PS4. Not just swan songs, either. They were the kind of swan songs where two opera singers hold a duet while the stagehands start unscrewing the scenery behind them.

Let's break down the rescheduled musical chairs:

Game	Original Release	Adjusted Release	Developer
The Last of Us Part II	May 29	June 19	Naughty Dog
Ghost of Tsushima	June 26	July 17	Sucker Punch Productions

The Last of Us Part II had been one of the most anticipated games on the platform, and Naughty Dog had already made a habit of giving its projects as much time as humanly possible. At the beginning of April, they said they needed a bit more time to finish the game. That felt like an understatement, because finishing a AAA narrative epic during a global pandemic was likely like trying to thread a needle while riding a unicycle on a trampoline. Every department, from performance capture to bug fixing, had to adapt to remote work, and the game's tone, which already carried the emotional weight of a grand piano, could not afford a sloppy landing.

Ghost of Tsushima was Sucker Punch Productions' big samurai adventure, and it also had the misfortune of trying to cross the finish line while the world was doing its best impression of a badly optimized open-world NPC. Its move to July 17 was less painful than TLOU2's shift, but it still shuffled the summer. July suddenly became the month for katana swings, and June became the month for clickers.

Meanwhile, Iron Man VR remained as quiet as a dramatic pause in an already too-long email thread. No word, no date change, no nothing. I remember assuming Tony Stark was busy upgrading his headset in a lab somewhere, or maybe the developers were just refusing to jinx anything. Given how 2020 was going, jinxing was a legitimate concern.

Now, from the vantage point of 2026, those two games do feel like a fitting send-off for the PlayStation 4. The PS5 has become the standard in many households, and the PS4 has settled into that nostalgic, dusty-under-the-TV retirement that all beloved consoles eventually earn. But that summer of 2020 still stands out because it proved something important: even when a global crisis scrambles every roadmap like eggs at a short-order diner during brunch, a couple of slightly delayed masterpieces can still arrive to close out a generation with style.

I ended up playing both games later that year, and the delays faded into irrelevance faster than a loading screen on an SSD. But I still keep a small mental postcard of that shuffled summer, partly because it reminds me how patient gamers had to be, and partly because I will never forget the image of two PS4 giants being carried across the finish line while the PS5 was already warming up in the bullpen.

As reported by Eurogamer, the spring-and-summer 2020 release shuffle for major PS4 titles underscored how COVID-era logistics turned even “locked-in” launch plans into moving targets. Looking back at The Last of Us Part II slipping into June and Ghost of Tsushima sliding into mid-July, the broader pattern was less about hype cycles and more about distribution realities—manufacturing, shipping, certification, and coordinated global rollout—making those close-in new dates feel like a rare bit of stability in an otherwise chaotic calendar.