"Nintendo Left Us Standing At The Altar" - Shawn Layden On The Vengeful Birth Of PlayStation 1
Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

Former Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Shawn Layden is better positioned than most to talk about the impact of the PlayStation brand – he began his career at Sony before the console even existed and would rise to the position of Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios.

Speaking to Eurogamer to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation brand, Layden talked at length on how the project came to be, referencing the infamous SNES PlayStation, which never happened:

We were going to build - or rather, we built - an optical drive peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo realised cartridges had already maxed out their memory footprints and so we - or rather, Ken Kutaragi - created the compact disc technology to support the SNES. And we were just about ready. I think it was at CES [Computer Entertainment Show] 1993, we were going to announce the partnership. And Nintendo left us standing at the altar, after they did a pivot at the last minute and went with Philips.

Rather than abandon the idea, Kutaragi was bold enough to suggest turning the optical drive into a new games machine that could challenge both Nintendo and Sega:

So there was Ken, proverbially standing at the altar with his optical disc drive in his hands. And, indignant, he went back to the leadership at Sony at the time and said: 'All I need is an OS and some more connecting tissue for this thing, and we can build our own game machine'.

"Nintendo Left Us Standing At The Altar" - Shawn Layden On The Vengeful Birth Of PlayStation 1
The unreleased SNES PlayStation — Image: Sony Computer Entertainment

Layden also comments on the famous lack of enthusiasm for video games that came from within Sony:

I think a lot of the leadership at the time didn't take it seriously. They thought: 'Oh my god, Sega and Nintendo own this thing [the console industry]. You think Sony's going to come in sideways and try to divvy that thing up into a three piece pie?' It was a 'fool's errand', I think some of them might have even called it at the time. But [then-Sony president Norio] Ohga-san was a believer. A lot of people thought we were taking a risk. It was a fight to get the Sony name onto the machine - they didn't want to be associated with it.

Layden wasn't part of the Sony Interactive Entertainment team from the very beginning – he joined Sony in 1987 and was working as an assistant to chairman and Sony founder Akio Morita out of the company's Japanese headquarters when the machine was launched – but he vividly remembers the first time he laid eyes on the PlayStation. What was his reaction to seeing Ridge Racer on PS1 for the first time? "Oh my god, this is going to be fucking amazing".

Layden would officially join Sony's Interactive Entertainment division in 1996, after the PlayStation had launched all over the world. Even then, he reveals that some within the company almost enjoyed the fact that they were ripping up the rulebook:

The president of PlayStation at the time was a guy named Terry Tokunaka. We'd worked together on the acquisition of Columbia Pictures, so I was kind of a known quantity. After the chairman's death, Terry asked me 'what are you going to do now? Why don't you come and join us in this new company, Sony Computer Entertainment?' I said, 'Okay, that's great. What would I do there?'

He said: 'You'd be a video game producer'. I said: 'I'll be honest with you, I don't know anything about making video games'. And Terry was very upfront. He said, 'It's all right. None of us do either. This is the perfect time to get in. We'll all make this stuff up as we go along together.'

The full interview is well worth a read. Layden parted company with Sony in 2019 and is currently employed as a strategic advisor at Tencent Games.

[source eurogamer.net]