PlayStation is an enormous brand and one of the biggest names in gaming nowadays, but back when it was just getting started, it was of course a different story. In a recent interview, Sony alumnus Shawn Layden reveals how the team secured Final Fantasy VII for PS1.
He recalls his early days when PlayStation was in its infancy, and how Sony Music was drafted in to help win over developers to make games for this burgeoning platform.
"When they decided they were getting into the game business, they knew they had the technology, the engineers," Layden says. "But they said 'let's be honest, we sell electronics'. Sony knew that without entertainment DNA, we would not be successful."
To that end, Sony Music joined the Sony Electronics team, using their sales and client relations experience to help get games onto the PS1. The way they worked was starkly different from the clean-cut engineers working on the console; essentially, their day involved taking publishers and developers out drinking and convincing them to develop games for Sony's machine.
Layden says the Sony Music team would all come in late and hungover, then head out at lunch time to start doing their thing. "We wouldn't see them again for the rest of the day, because Sony Music populated sales, marketing, advertising, publisher relations," he says. "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 VII off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation."
He describes the announcement of that deal in particular as an "oh my god" moment, giving full credit to the "amazing" Sony Music guys and their "doggedness of just trying to get a deal over the line".
So, PlayStation secured this crucial exclusive thanks to some smooth talking at the bar and, presumably, no small amount of alcohol.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 12
I think this was the biggest and most important exclusive Playstation got over the 30 years.
This was the moment people realised Playstation was serious.
@UltimateOtaku91 that and Metal gear solid. What a great time the PS1 generation was. We'll never see it's like again, thanks to gaming now being a fully corporate enterprise. Although the indie scene does seem to be going from strength to strength
I remember reading at the time that one of the biggest factors that managed to prise so many developers from staple relationships with Nintendo was the fact that CD Rom offered such a massive jump in storage, allowing the developers the opportunity to realise their dreams for a title without cartridge constraints. But the Whiskey was a good addition to the story! 🥴
There is an incredibly honest, interesting documentary on the birth of the Xbox, really worth a watch. Is there anything similar that covers this era of Playstation, as it sounds like it would be a good watch!
I'd be pretty good at my job too if it was to ply folks with drink and tell them how great our stuff is.
Joking aside, I remember being a Sega boy (always a Nintendo boy at heart, but the SNES was sold out in my town for a month before my birthday, so I ended up with a Megadrive at the eleventh hour) and looking at the PlayStation and thinking "my brother's stereo is cool, but what do these guys know about videogames?". Turns out they know an awful lot.
Pity that same tenacity couldn’t have been used to ensure Square didn’t BUTCHER the trophy lists for the first two remake games.
I played rpg before ff7, but ff7 is the game that make rpg my favorite genre 😃
While this is a nice anecdote it’s probably only a tiny part of the real story. Nintendo made the worst choice imaginable in going with a cartridge based N64 which launched with games on 4-12 mb cartridges and only reached 64MB by 1999.
PSOne CD-Roms were around 700MB and FFViI came on 4 Discs. Games like FFVII-IX were literally impossible on the N64.
@UltimateOtaku91 A little thing called GTA was a PlayStation exclusive too.
@ChrisDeku Yep. Over on Sony you could play your music CDs and later your DVDs in addition to having bigger games.
The decision to continue with cartridges was a disaster. Even SEGA realised that. Nintendo were very lucky in retrospect that they brought their A-game when it came to their N64 first party.
If you ever wonder how stupid Sony is as a company, just remember that even Steve Jobs was baffled that Apple beat them to the punch with the iPod. Sony had everything to create a similar device, but their different departments don’t communicate, so it didn’t occur to them.
Final Fantasy VII proves that music and booze will always be the universe's ultimate saving grace. Let us hope PS is always blasting Nobuo Uematsu scores and shot gunning Asahi.
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