Although the PlayStation has extraordinary copy protection, many hackers, home-brewers, and pirates worked around it via the infamous "Disc Swap" trick which is possible as the console uses a lid in a similar fashion to a portable CD player. This trick involves swapping a regular PlayStation disc with a back-up or rewritable CD during the startup.

Likely because of this exploit, Sony created future numbered PlayStation consoles that use disc trays rather than lids.