30 Years Ago, PlayStation’s Biggest Risk Changed Gaming Forever

After off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation,” Layden said. “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.”

Layden had joined Sony in 1987, nine years before the launch of the PlayStation. Layden would move to the PlayStation team in 1996, just a few years after the tech company shifted its CD-drive peripheral for Nintendo’s SNES to a fully-fledged console. The former executive said that top brass within Sony wasn’t convinced that the PlayStation would be the success it would become.

“Within Sony, a lot of the leadership at the time didn’t take it seriously,” he told Eurogamer. “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.’”

But snatching a piece of that pie took a gutsy move from Sony Music’s star team of cigarette-smoking dealmakers. At the time, both Nintendo and Sega used tried-and-true contemporary gaming marketing to sell games to younger audiences. Most games would show an action-packed art asset in print ads. Television ads were more creative, with live-action elements or even the occasional dig at the competition. But they mostly boiled down to what had worked well for years. Organized efforts to appeal to older players, like Nintendo’s “Play It Loud” ad campaign, came off as weird, inauthentic, and grating.

While PlayStation had its fair share of edgy ads making fun of the other side (it was still the 90’s after all), it was also on the cutting edge of what was actually cool to wider audiences at the time.

“Gaming advertising had been really straightforward,” Layden said. “But the advertising team at PlayStation came from Sony Music, so we were marketing games like you market rock bands – with a little of the mystery, a little of the sexy.”

Layden pointed out the cover of games like the first Wipeout, which looked a lot like an EDM album cover. Television ads in Japan used music from then-popular U.S. bands like Chemical Brothers and Prodigy. Ads for games like Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, and Wipeout helped make gaming cool to the mainstream. Of course, it also helped that these games were genuinely impressive and pretty fun to play.

“We’d be going to clubs during that time and see PlayStation 1 kiosks with Wipeout in nightclubs,” Layden said. “You’ve got your vodka Red Bull in one hand, and you’re playing Wipeout with the other. It was the beginnings of making gaming into a lifestyle, the beginnings of making it something where gaming is more than just a distraction.”

“Gaming became less something whispered about in pubs and more you overhearing someone saying, ‘oh I’m playing Tomb Raider,” he concluded.

The rest is , of course, history. Sony’s cutting-edge way of marketing games was replicated by Sega and Nintendo when advertising their next consoles. Microsoft would also take a similar approach when jumping into the gaming market with the first Xbox in 2001, targeting adults almost exclusively.

The tonal change of marketing across the games industry can also be credited to the advertising world catching up to the cultural shift of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But PlayStation was ahead of the curve in proving that the old ways of selling games had become archaic. It’s a cyclical occurrence in most of the entertainment world. Nintendo would change the game once more in the late 2000’s getting the likes of Beyoncé and Robin Williams playing its systems for TV commercials.

For PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary Sony’s approach to game marketing was for its time. While some of it has aged poorly, there’s no denying how pivotal it was in changing the perception of gaming and the soon-to-be billion-dollar industry forever. And in many ways, that’s just as important as the iconic games we all remember fondly three decades later.