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Dec 12, 2017 · Fri 12 Dec 2014 19.05 EST. Sony transformed the way we listen to music with the invention of the Walkman in 1979. The original prototype was created by an audio engineer for Sony co-founder...
Apr 15, 2020 · How did PlayStation become the cool one? It started with a snub. Nintendo, the biggest name in 1980s gaming, drafted in Sony, which had no experience with games, to collaborate on a new...
- Tom Faber
Dec 3, 2019 · At the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, Sony revealed to the world a video game console on which it had jointly worked with Nintendo. This SNES with a built-in CD-Rom drive was a project...
- Sony's journey from consumer tech to leader of the modern gaming revolution.
- The Nintendo Problem
- The Sound of Launch
- Play In Our World
- Creating The Third Place
- IGN\r Recommends
By Matt Purslow
Updated: Dec 29, 2023 4:01 pm
Posted: Aug 4, 2023 2:15 pm
At the dawn of the 1990s, there were only two names that mattered in the world of video game consoles: Sega and Nintendo.
Back then, no one could have foreseen that a consumer electronics company with zero experience in gaming would disrupt the space so thoroughly that its name would soon become the de-facto noun for home consoles. Not just that, but its impact would change the way we thought about games forever.
Sony’s PlayStation wasn’t just a console. It was the revolution that began the modern era of video games. This is the story of how its legacy began, told by two former Sony presidents; Andrew House, one of the original minds behind the PlayStation’s groundbreaking marketing who rose to CEO status; and Shawn Layden, who helped developers bring some of PlayStation's most beloved games to life for over 20 years.
All the confidence in the world couldn’t make up for Sony’s clear disadvantage, though. The company had no experience in creating video games at all. There wasn’t even one person on staff who could rival superstar developers like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto or Sega’s Yuji Naka.
Shawn Layden: “We didn't have any first-party development at that time, because you can't spin that stuff up in six months. You've got to spend years doing that.”
Andrew House: “We couldn't afford to have that strategy. We had to be heavily flipped the other way around, very dependent on third party publishers and third party developers.”
Shawn Layden: “We had a very deep partnership with Namco from the start. If you really want to talk about bringing arcade into the home, nothing told that story – or sold that story – better than Tekken and Ridge Racer. People were lining up in arcades to drop their 100 yen coin into a slot to play three minutes of these games. And we're saying, ‘You can take this thing home.’”
“And then Ubisoft and Infogrames, and you name it, everyone just found a place to come to, where they thought they all had an equal chance to be the biggest dog in the room.”
People were lining up in arcades to play three minutes of these games. And we're saying, ‘You can take this thing home.’
Building PlayStation required more than just a console and some games, though. It needed a brand, an identity. And it needed to be built by people who understood that a console was more than a plastic box of silicon chips.
Shawn Layden: “Innovation number one was the move to optical media. Innovation number two was Sony's recognition that going into entertainment was a completely new thing for them. The electronics team, though they had the technical prowess, they didn't know exactly what entertainment was all about. The original Sony Interactive Entertainment was a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music Entertainment. And you brought these two cultures together in one room.”
The Sony Music team envisioned PlayStation not as a physical console plugged into your TV, but as a lifestyle. Like music, gaming had its own culture, aesthetic, and personality. And PlayStation’s identity was absolutely not going to be the childlike image projected by Nintendo.
Andrew House: “You try and avoid using that awful word ‘attitude’, but it was something that was very prominent at the time. It was games that had just tonally a very different message around them than what you've seen before. They weren't just cute and fun, there was slight elements of darkness that was starting to emerge.”
Shawn Layden: “Particularly in Japan, when we started advertising for PlayStation games, it was like nothing anyone had seen before. Early PlayStation advertising was groundbreaking. It was taking that music sensibility and putting it into an interactive entertainment medium, and seeing what they can do with that. It spoke differently. It pitched differently. No, PlayStation really overturned the tea table. And everyone had to deal with the world that Sony was going to create after that.”
By the final months of 1994, the PlayStation identity had been found and forged. It was time to launch the console in its first region: Sony’s home territory of Japan.
What could have been a disaster was instead a monumental success. PlayStation significantly outsold the Sega Saturn in both the US and UK, and the console quickly became the flagship games machine of the generation. Within its first year, Sony took control of 20% of the entire American video game market.
The PlayStation needed to provide more than just initial novelty if it were to survive, though. And despite strong success in its first year, there was still some doubt that PlayStation could really contend with the industry heavyweights.
Andrew House: “I was trying to get a business off the ground distributing other internal Sony Studio games in Japan at a certain point. And I went to the editor of the most prominent magazine in games that was out there at the time. I remember he looked me in the eye at the end of the presentation, he said, ‘Sony will never make a good game. You don't have what it takes. You don't have an eye to quality. You'll never take on Nintendo.’"
And so the real battle began. Sony had to prove that PlayStation was the place to find not just quality, but experiences you couldn’t play anywhere else. Thanks to the cheaper CD format, it was able to encourage development partners to take creative risks and experiment beyond established genres. And so the PlayStation quickly became the home of some of gaming’s most innovative creations.
Shawn Layden: “We gave a lot of autonomy to the studios to decide what they want to make.”
“As the first party platform holder, there was an imperative upon PlayStation and Sony to continue to bring not just a variety of content, but actually create new genres. To make gaming something that it wasn't. At the time, in the early days, it was fighting, racing, and RPG. Those were the key categories. It wasn't until PlayStation, where you had something like PaRappa the Rapper, which introduced the idea of rhythm action gaming. Had to make that one up, because they didn't know what to call it.”
The concept behind the PlayStation 2 was simple: do it again, just bigger and better. But despite its success with the original PlayStation, the sequel initially proved to be a difficult second album.
Shawn Layden: “It was the first time for Sony to launch a successive platform. Sega had done it, Nintendo had done it. We'd never done it, so we didn't know what we didn't know about the trickiness around that.”
“We had to make it up as we went along. The PlayStation 2 had some architectural uniqueness to it, which was difficult to get across to some of the developers who were more used to working on a traditional, arcade-based platform.”
Despite the difficulties, the original PlayStation provided a good blueprint. The new console had to push the technology forward in a way that would fundamentally change the opportunities available to both developers and players. For PlayStation, that was the CD-ROM. For PlayStation 2, that was DVD.
Andrew House: “I think that was the second aspect that started to open up another chapter in PlayStation's vision. It was not just about games or interactive entertainment. It was not necessarily a home hub in some sort of living room dominance sense, but it would allow you to have lots of different members of the family still potentially interact with PlayStation for different reasons.”
The PS2’s DVD drive wasn’t just a movie player, though. Much like how CD-ROMs allowed developers to think beyond the limiting boundaries of cartridges, DVDs provided the space to create significantly more ambitious games.
- Matt Purslow
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Dec 6, 2019 · PlayStation was largely the brainchild of Sony Computer Entertainment engineer-turned-CEO and chairman Ken Kutaragi, whose interest in video games can be traced back to watching his daughter...
- Blake Hester
Mar 28, 2024 · Sony, major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products whose diverse activities have included films, music, and financial services, among other ventures. It has been one of the most successful and multifaceted brands in marketing history.
Sony established Sony Corporation of America, the company's first subsidiary in America, in 1960. And in the same year, Sony made another innovation by releasing the world's first non-projection type all-transistor and portable television, Sony TV8-301 . In 1961, Sony launched the world's first compact transistor VTR, the PV-100.
