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.
The origins of PlayStation go all the way back to the late 1980s, when Sony agreed to produce sound processor chips for Nintendo’s new SNES console. Just a short duration into their partnership, Nintendo proposed a joint venture. It wanted Sony to create a new drive system for the SNES, based on the CD-ROM format that Sony had pioneered. But the deal collapsed in an ugly fashion, leaving many Sony executives bitter and wary of working in the industry again.
Shawn Layden, former President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America: “There was a sense that video games were toys. And Sony is not a toy company. What confidence do we have to fight on someone else's battlefield, with unproven weapons, and no experience and strategy?”
But Ken Kutaragi, the man who first arranged Sony’s deal with Nintendo, refused to be deterred.
Shawn Layden: “Kutaragi-san, often called ‘father of PlayStation’, was trying to get the company to not back down from their gaming ambitions, but rather lean further in, and say that ‘If we can't do a peripheral for Nintendo, let's just do our own machine.’”
Kutaragi’s vision was to create a machine that brought the cutting-edge experience of arcades into the homes of regular people. That would mean a console capable of 3D graphics. At the time, that felt like a true quantum leap beyond Sega and Nintendo’s 2D offerings. But while stellar visuals would be what would sell the console to the public, it was the use of cheap CD-ROMs rather than expensive cartridges that would be Sony’s secret weapon. Those shiny plastic bagels would convince the wider games industry to bet on PlayStation. At least, that’s what Sony hoped.
My boss said to me, more or less, 'You're an idiot and it's a toy and it's destined for failure.'
Shawn Layden: “Getting flash ROMs manufactured and built in Hong Kong or Taiwan... the lead times of getting those things done, the expense per unit, was light years away from what we were able to do with optical disc. You didn't have to have a 100,000 unit plus minimum order. On flash ROM, [that] was the order of the day for things like Genesis or Super Nintendo.
With optical disc, you can just order 10,000 discs. And if your game sells out on Thursday, give us a call, and we can replenish you by Wednesday the next week.”
Andrew House, former President and Global CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment: “That, I think, was the aspect that people sort of lose sight of. [Kutaragi’s] philosophy was that by lowering the cost of how much [games] costs to make, physically, [...] you could have more developer participation in the industry. You'd lower the barrier to entry so there could be lots more companies making games. That in turn opened up creative risk taking of a kind that hadn't been seen in the business before, which wasn't possible with the previous model.”
Despite skepticism among the executives, Katuragi had the backing of Sony’s new CEO, Norio Ohga, who had previously spent over a decade as the president of CBS/Sony Records. One of Ohga’s first decisions as CEO was to purchase Columbia Pictures Entertainment. He wasn’t just interested in furthering Sony’s electronics business, but its entertainment ambitions, too. And Katuragi’s PlayStation could be the gateway into a new and lucrative market. Still, the first moves were made with some trepidation.
Andrew House: “When I joined the division eventually, I think my then boss said to me, more or less, ‘You're an idiot and it's a toy and it's destined for failure and why would you want to go and work on something like that?’”
Shawn Layden: “There was kind of a sense from the finance side, it's like, ‘Please lease everything, because in nine months you may not be there anymore anyway.’ We're up against this sink-or-swim dichotomy.”
But down in the newly-dug PlayStation trenches, the staff of Sony’s fresh gaming division were eager to bring the fight to their heavyweight rivals.
Andrew House: “Most of us were still very, very junior in the industry, and so there wasn't a lot of fear. There wasn't a lot of respect for conventional wisdom. And therefore there was possibly quite a lot of misplaced arrogance around the fact that we knew what we were doing, that we were going to get it right.”
Shawn Layden: “We were just all there to embark on this new venture, with the enthusiasm and the gusto of the uninitiated. We just dived into the swimming pool and thought, ‘Yeah, Nintendo, Sega, these two entrenched, embedded leaders in the field... sure, why can't we start a new platform and take them on head-to-head?’”
The Nintendo Problem
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.'
Sony’s initial reliance on third-party development was a very different approach to how Nintendo and Sega did business. Within a couple of months of the SNES launching, it already had a trio of Nintendo-developed games. In contrast, Sony planned to launch the PlayStation in Japan without a single game made by its own hand. But the company knew first-party development would be vital to its long-term success. Sony needed its own developer.
Shawn Layden: “At the time, we had a partnership with a company called Psygnosis in Europe, which we ended up buying three years later to bring that facility in-house.
“They had reach, they had breadth. And they had a sensibility about wanting to be successful in the Japanese market. And I think they were also looking at us as being an insurgent party that they could get in, and be part of a growing enterprise, not just being bolted onto somebody else's established success.”
Sony bought Psygnosis in 1993. The studio would go on to create Wipeout, the jewel in the crown of PlayStation’s European launch in 1995. And alongside the Tokyo-based Japan Studio, Psygnosis formed the first building block of what would become SCE Worldwide Studios – better known today as the hugely successful PlayStation Studios. The path to God of War and The Last of Us began here.
The Sound of Launch
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.
Andrew House: “[One of the original commercials for PlayStation] was a bunch of people in their twenties hammering on a closed storeroom door, shouting, ‘one, two, three,’ ‘ichi, ni, san’, which was also the launch date, 12/03. And no one had seen game campaigns like that before.”
“There was a very simple idea around the targeting of the initial campaign, that the mindset was going to be of someone who was 17. So it was if you were older, in your twenties and upwards, it was that fun mindset that you had when you were 17 and that's what the platform was going to offer. If you were younger than that, then it was what you aspired to be, because that was cool and hip.”
100,000 PlayStations were sold in Japan on launch day. By the end of the year, 300,000 had been sold. Despite tough competition from Sega, which launched its own 3D-capable Saturn console just weeks before, the PlayStation was an instant success story.
PlayStation is the rogue platform. You can tell it things, but it won't necessarily listen.
The next step was to bring PlayStation to the rest of the world. Sony knew it had to make an impact ahead of its US and European launch in September 1995, and a brand new summer trade show called E3 was the place to do it. But on the first day of the show, it seemed as if Sega had stolen Sony’s thunder. The rival company announced that its Saturn console, which was also planned for a September launch in the West, was available right there and then in US stores for $399. It was a huge move from Sega, but one that Sony was well prepared for.
For the PlayStation presentation, Steve Race, the head of development at Sony Computer Entertainment America, took to the stage to deliver the industry’s boldest mic drop. He simply leant towards the microphone, said “$299”, and walked away.
Shawn Layden: “We all understand, to some degree, that created bad blood between SCE and the Entertainment Software Association, which was sponsoring the event. I think the ground rules were, ‘We'll have this keynote panel discussion, but you can't bring a commercial message to it. You just have to talk about the warm fuzzies of interactive entertainment.’ And for Sony’s guys to come up there and go, ‘Yeah, thanks for the rules, but... $299.’ Mic drop, off the stage. It just fed into the narrative that PlayStation is the rogue platform. You can tell it things, but it won't necessarily listen.”
But while the statement created headlines, this Sega-undercutting price point came with incredible risks.
Andrew House: “The thing that everybody was really frightened about was currencies, and being put in a position of selling a [console] that the more that you sold, the more money you lost. And whether it was $299 or not, that's exactly what happened. I went back and checked exactly what it was, but the Yen strengthened to, I think, 80 Yen to the dollar in the summer of the launch year, which was a historic high. And so you are in this really, really awful position now of $299 sounded great on stage, but then when you start to look at the economics around that, it's potentially an absolute disaster for that first year or two.”
Play In Our World
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.”
Andrew House: “I mean something like PaRappa the Rapper was certainly not without risk in terms of making it a big AAA title in the US. And so there was an element of the quirky. It was a mindset of trying to find the somewhat unconventional, or giving the conventional a twist.
“I think Crash Bandicoot very much fell into that category. It was a platform game on its surface, but had other elements. The choice of a Bandicoot to be the lead character. The ad campaign of having a guy dressed up in a suit going shouting outside Nintendo headquarters.”
Shawn Layden: “You had Mario on the left side, and you had Sonic on the right side. And what was PlayStation bringing to the party? I think we put some energy in trying to make Crash Bandicoot into a type of mascot for the platform, but I think the breadth of our offering diluted the impact of having a mascot or not.”
Nothing helps sell a title faster than a government label telling you you shouldn't play this.
Crash Bandicoot showed how PlayStation was thinking differently about established video game staples. But elsewhere in the console’s library, developers were exploring uncharted territory. Where the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo had thrived on platformers and fighting games, some of PlayStation’s biggest successes were in action-fuelled adventures and blood-drenched horror.
Shawn Layden: “I remember Biohazard in Japan, AKA Resident Evil, was the first game to go out with an ‘explicit content’ sticker on it. This big, red triangle, like, ‘danger, danger.’ And of course, nothing helps sell a title faster than a government label telling you you shouldn't play this.”
Andrew House: “I think the best example I can give of a game where both the gameplay mechanics are different and represent a real move shift forward in what games could be is Tomb Raider. Coupled with a strong female character as the lead, an adventure setting, shades of Indiana Jones. All of those elements together led us to believe that this is something that you want to really get behind and make emblematic of the platform.”
Perhaps Sony’s most significant move, though, was to convince Japan’s most prolific RPG developer to leave almost a decade of Nintendo loyalty behind and bring its most ambitious game to PlayStation.
Shawn Layden: “For [the Sony Music guys] to get Square to bring Final Fantasy VII to PlayStation was huge.”
“With Final Fantasy VII, I remember those opening cutscenes and the ability to ramp that up. It really showed that we'd come to a new age in gaming. Part of the promise of PlayStation was to bring 3D gaming into the home. With something like Final Fantasy, with the artists and the visionaries at Square, it really showed what you could do with this. All developers saw it. It just gave them more colors to paint with, more shapes to work with.”
Final Fantasy 7 went on to become the PlayStation’s second-biggest game of all time, selling over 10 million copies. But, in a demonstration of the diversity of PlayStation’s library, Final Fantasy’s huge story and even larger swords were in complete contrast to the PlayStation’s best-selling game of all time: Gran Turismo. Developed by Sony’s own Japan Studio, it was a racing sim the likes of which had never been seen outside of an arcade before. To date, it has sold almost 11 million copies.
No matter your gaming tastes, there was something for you on PlayStation. Sony’s advancements in both technology and business strategy had pushed the games industry into a vibrant and varied new place. By 1999, the company had claimed an astonishing 60% of the American video game market. It was the uncontested king of the fifth console generation. Its position was so strong that it easily fended off competition from Sega’s new, more advanced Dreamcast.
But the PlayStation couldn’t last forever. With a new millennium in sight, and armed with all its new experience, Sony set in motion plans for a successor console.
Creating The Third Place
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.
Shawn Layden: “That was just a very serendipitous alignment of technological trends. And PlayStation got in there before anybody else. What you're doing is, you're making just a bigger palette to paint on. And more painting is more time, more time is more money. But more painting is also richer, more involved storylines. You could actually have a narrative.”
And so began the journey towards the huge, cinematic action games that define PlayStation today.
Shawn Layden: “I remember when we did The Getaway when I was in the London studio. That was really groundbreaking. We were making a movie and a game at the same time. And it was a huge step change from whatever action adventure tropes had been prevalent at the time.”
“Because you had DVD, you had endless amounts of memory. And you could put in all kinds of textures. You can put 16 square miles of London into a DVD. You had more room to play with. And that means you can tell a bigger story. You can tell a more nuanced story. And I think that was a huge change that PS2 brought to the gaming market, the inception of that hugely narrative-based gaming.”
Storage and narrative have remained a core part of PlayStation’s DNA. The evolution from DVD to Blu-Ray to SSD has seen Sony’s story ambitions expand. Today, the PS5 is considered the home of cinematic single-player games. In fact, that’s what it’s almost exclusively known for. In contrast to the wild and experimental days of the original PlayStation, modern Sony is much more focused and risk-averse. There’s no PaRappa, no Vib-Ribbon.
But the foundations of the original console are still clear to see. Third-party partnerships remain the lifeblood of not just the platform, but modern console gaming. An ever-expanding array of developers create new and fascinating games every year. And that variety means that no one person’s PlayStation or Xbox library is the same as anyone else’s. Long gone is the era when your collection was guaranteed to be almost entirely made up of games produced by Shigeru Miyamoto.
The PlayStation changed video games forever, and we play in its world.
The interviews in this article have been edited for length and clarity. Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
