The ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ PlayStation 3 Theme Is Still Peak Culture
Back in 2010, the recession was booming, Rob McElhenney only had one recognizable body type on TV and the hottest item in the PlayStation Store was the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia PlaysStation 3 home-screen theme — assuming you were a person of impeccable taste.
Today, it’s hard to imagine that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the longest-running live-action sitcom in American history, would ever need to use trendy guerrilla marketing strategies to grab the attention of hip, young viewers. In 2025, the multitude of obsessive Millennial It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans is so immense that neither McElhenney nor FX necessarily need to pour precious time, money and creativity into infiltrating Fortnite just to get the word out about Always Sunny to a group of young potential viewers who are about two generations removed from ever using the word “hip.”
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But back when Always Sunny was still relatively young and not the center of a sprawling online fan ecosystem, FX had the brilliant idea to court a younger audience by releasing a paid aesthetic theme for the PS3 showing the main characters of Always Sunny in vaguely seductive poses with beer-bottle-shaped icons separating the sections of the home screen. This week on Twitter, one cultural historian called RealRadec reminded those of us who were gaming in 2010 of how good we once had it:
In addition to the above PS3 theme, on which RealRadec spent real money to bring it back into the zeitgeist where it belongs, there was also a purchasable It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia theme for the PlayStation Portable that, sadly, disappeared with the rest of the PSP store when PlayStation shut down the servers in 2021.
Somewhere out there, one It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan with a passion for mobile gaming consoles that are significantly less popular than their competitors has no idea that they are sitting on an invaluable piece of cultural history that deserves to be preserved like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel so that it doesn’t suffer the degrading erosion of the piss-soaked Virgin Mary water stain in Paddy’s Pub's back office.
As Fat Mac dressed up as Indiana Jones would say, that Always Sunny PSP belongs in a museum.