PlayStation is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original console, and it turns out its early team didn’t have much of a clue what they were doing at first.
In an interview with Eurogamer, former Sony Interactive Entertainment America president Shawn Layden reminisces about the early days of the company. “I joined PlayStation specifically in ’96 when they were a year into it,” he says. “They’d already launched in North America and in Japan.”
Layden had already worked with the then PlayStation president Terry Tokunaka on Sony‘s acquisition of Columbia Pictures, so he was “kind of a known quantity.” Seems Sony has always liked buying companies. Following the death of Sony’s chairman at the time, Tokunaka gave Layden the kind of job offer that doesn’t seem to exist anymore in an age where years of experience are a prerequisite, even in many entry-level jobs.
“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,'” Laden explains. “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.'”
Clearly, Tokunaka’s decision to work with Layden because he knew him even though he had no video game industry experience was a smart one. The early years of the PS1 are fondly remembered by many as a time of great innovation and experimentation. Games were quicker to make, took more risks, and produced weirder results. Layden went on to become president of SIEA from 2014 to 2019, after which Jim Ryan took over.
If you want to relive the glory days, check out our list of best PS1 games.