The L.A. Memorial Sports Arena is overflowing with thousands of videogame players and industry professionals, and they all just had a collective freakout. At the Sony PlayStation press conference, a teaser video was played and it gradually dawned on the room what they were seeing: a beloved classic roleplaying game from the early days of PlayStation, Final Fantasy 7, would be remade almost 20 years later. It would be one of the most memorable moments during that week of announcements at the E3 video game convention last month.
Shawn Layden is the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, the U.S. division of Sony that released and manages the PlayStation video game console and its hundreds of games. Layden’s nearly 30-year career at Sony has spanned the company’s diverse operations starting when the company was primarily creating Walkmans and TVs to the creation of Sony Music, when Sony bought CBS Records and Layden worked to sign artists to the label. Then in 1995, when Sony formed Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and began creating the PlayStation, they took half the team from Sony’s hardware division and the other half from Sony Music, and Layden began working on PlayStation. He was named CEO to SCEA in April 2014.
“The hardware guys knew we could make a great box, but what would we put on it? I think it is inspiring that Sony said, ‘We have all of these A&R guys in the music business. We will make them A&R guys for games. They can go out and do deals.’ They also brought to the company the sensibility that it’s not really about the platform,” says Layden. “People thought Sony was crazy to get into the gaming business. Nintendo and Sega owned it. But we bought the music guys in and that changed the whole dynamic. They bought something in from music: it’s all about the artist. No one knows who the record label is. No one knows who record executives are. It’s about the artists. And we needed to go to games with an artist focus, which means developers.”
Read the full article at Fast Company.