Support NeoGAF

[Tiago Rodrigues]

Some amazing tidbits:

PlayStation faced established competition - Nintendo, Sega were already giants of the console world. How did Sony decide it was going to take them on?

Layden: Obviously, 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.
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'.
We moved out of Sony's headquarters to a place in Aoyama, which is about 20 miles away but more in the entertainment district of Tokyo, because they felt that was important to the DNA of the company - and that was probably the best decision the company made.

How Sony got Squaresoft drunk (basically) and managed Final Fantasy VII exclusive:

So the initial stage was made a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. Half the company was from the music side and, well, you could see it on the shop floor at 8am. All the hardware engineers were at their desks wearing their Sony vests, working on their engineering thing. And then around 10 through 11am, all the Sony Music guys would come in - hungover, sunglasses, cigarettes hanging out their mouths. They'd look at the Nikkei paper for 45 minutes, drink a cup of tea, and then go: 'alright, lunch'. They'd all stand up. They'd all leave.

We wouldn't see them again for the rest of the day, because Sony Music populated sales, marketing, advertising, publisher relations. So those were the guys who would go out with the people at Square and ply them with whiskey until the wee hours of the morning to finally get Final Fantasy 7 off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation. When that announcement was made, that was really the 'oh my god' moment. 'Sony's really serious about this now.' And that's down to the music guys, the doggedness of just trying to get a deal over the line. They were amazing.

About Playstation's main philosophy that many people on Gaf haven't caught on when talking about the "lack of exclusives":

Sony deliberately never had more than maybe 22 percent of [first-party] software share. On the Sega platforms and Nintendo, first-party had 80, 85, 90 percent of the software market. But we always knew PlayStation would only be successful if we made it, quote, 'The People's Platform'. It's for third parties to come make a business. We'll come in and we'll get, you know, 25 percent typically at launch, the share is higher because we put all the bets on the new games. But over time, you know, the real leaders in that marketplace as far as revenue and share goes were the Activisions and the Take-Twos and EA.

Our first party responsibility was to grow the pie overall, and as the pie gets bigger everyone's slice gets bigger, so everyone's happy. Growing the market overall meant creating new types of games, new genres of games, and not competing in some of the standard genre categories. And so you got games like PaRappa the Rapper. You got games like SingStar, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Who's going to make those games? It was a first-party imperative to show, firstly, the power of the platform, and then secondly, the endless categories that we could build games into. We weren't just trapped into three genres and trying to fight for market share from each other.

So I think those are the important decisions taken early on.

On proprietary architectures like Cell and Emotion Engine and why eventually they didn't work out:

What was it like being part of those early conversations around what consoles could do? You were on board when Sony came up with the Cell Processor, the Emotion Engine - these magical terms that now seem to have gone away. What's changed?

Layden: From a development perspective, things like the Emotion Engine at the heart of PlayStation 2, and the Cell processor at the heart of PS3, were the biggest headaches of the day. Trying to learn to build for those proprietary architectures required you learn new skills to get the most out of them. Naughty Dog always found a way to get under the hood of the tech before anybody else. Of course they had early access, but they burrowed deep. Being platform exclusive allowed you to push the limits of that platform's capabilities and you didn't have to make compromises, which you do when you do a multi-platform product. It's like, 'don't push too hard on the frame-rate, because this other platform can't handle that'.

Rather than make two versions of the same game where one looks remarkably better than the other, you just sort of balance everything out so it all looks the same. It's why the PlayStation homegrown stuff looks better on PlayStation than anything else, because that's all they do. That's all the tech they need to know about. And I think that gave special advantages on PS2 and PS3, which took other people a long time to catch up, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. It was a bit of a headache, and there was a huge cost involved. PS3 hardware took a long time to get to profitability, a long time, whereas when we launched PS4, it was pretty much a non-loss product from day one.

Read the rest of the interview because it's actually great insight, specially the PS3 era, some stories from the beginning of the brand, etc

 

[AJUMP23]

Thanks for sharing.