Monolith has announced that they have joined Sony's Playstation 2 middleware program, and will provide their LithTech 2 engine to developers for the platform. They've rewritten parts of the engine to work specifically with the PS2 hardware, as shown in this excerpt from the press release:

Built upon Monolith's LithTech PC foundation, the PlayStation2 and PC versions of LithTech will share many design and interface similarities allowing PC developers familiar with traditional 3D engines to easily switch to PlayStation2 development. However, to insure optimum performance with PlayStation2 hardware, the Monolith development team has re-engineered several parts of LithTech to maximize developer's potential with powerful features such as NURBs, displacement mapping and, most importantly, parallel processing. Designed from the ground up to be modular and extensible, LithTech's flexibility offers unprecedented power to create unique titles that push the technology envelope.

"Other companies have chosen to simply port their 3D technology straight from PC to PlayStation2. But, Monolith strongly believes a direct port will not provide game developers with a comprehensive, specialized set of tools," said Hall. "Our dedicated team of programmers, game designers, and technical support experts have customized the LithTech engine in order to take full advantage of the incredible power of PlayStation2. Additionally, they are continually refining, tuning and improving the engine to meet the rapidly changing demands of the videogame market."