The PlayStation 2's meteoric journey to become the best-selling console of all time transformed not just gaming, but culture at large. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, God of War, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty started a new era of interactive stories – one where games competed with films for prestige and attention, and were discussed not just in specialist magazines and forums but in mainstream newspapers and national TV shows.
Today, on the 25th anniversary of the PS2's launch in Europe, IGN has spoken to two people who witnessed the console's launch, and rapid rise, from different angles – one insider and one outsider. Shawn Layden was a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and would later hold some of the most senior roles at Playstation, and Daniel Griffiths was the deputy editor for Official Playstation Magazine in the UK.
They told IGN about their personal memories from that period: Griffiths recalls the panic at the console's surprise reveal, how Xbox were "in awe of" the press, and how one Sony party turned ended with a river of melted chocolate coins; Layden describes his astonishment at first seeing a PS2 demo, the fear of failure in the console's first year, and how it made gaming became a hobby you could discuss "in polite company".
IGN: What was your first memory of seeing the PS2?
Shawn Layden: The first thing I saw was a demo for Gran Turismo on PS2. We were at a corporate meeting and they had a video of it. And it just knocked us off our chairs. Sadly, Gran Turismo 3 didn't launch with the hardware because that team takes forever to get their games done, but it gave us a glimpse. That leap, I don't think, has ever been met again in the console generations, the jump from PS1 to PS2. It took you to a different f*cking planet. And on this planet, everything runs in 60 frames per second.
IGN: How did dev teams react when you knew PS2 was coming?
Shawn Layden: You had to start peeling off teams to put them in a double-secure locked room where no one could go in without security clearance because we had the prototype dev kits there. The rest of us [were] just trying to do the day-to-day. If someone who's not cleared sees the dev kit, then you've got to ship them off to an island somewhere. So there's a lot of energy around the secrecy and the confidentiality around it, but the excitement was off the charts.
IGN: Was there a rivalry between those teams chosen to work with PS2 and other developers?
Shawn Layden: It wasn't so much a rivalry as it was a sense of awe and wonder. There were our top engineers, our top designers, our top physics guys. They're all going into this one room in the studio, which no one else can get into. But everyone knows what's going on there, right? It was as if an alien ship had landed in our backyard. We're trying to analyze the tech that it brought to us.
IGN: How did the PS2 change the kind of games you could make?
Shawn Layden: In [PlayStation's London Studio], it created the opportunity for us to make a game like The Getaway, which is the first – in my view anyway – cinematic gaming experience. It was a Guy Ritchie film, except you were in it. It's not quite Hollywood, but we knew that the game was not just the gameplay itself. And for that story to be compelling and realistic, you had to get real story writers. You had to hire folks who would write scores for movies to write scores for games. It was crazy to be in the studio and have like four or five London-based actors just coming in to do the overdubs and to do the motion capture. Trying to get them used to being in a mocap rig is like trying to teach a bear to do scuba diving. It was fascinating. You realize you're making a game that's actually not just going to be a shoot-'em-up, it's going to be a story. And that was probably the most exciting PS2 moment I had in London.
The PS1 generation was great and wonderful and brilliant, but it was kind of like your dad's game console. PS2 became a completely different way to create and appreciate gaming – it was really the beginning of narrative-driven gaming.
IGN: How big a deal was the DVD player?
Shawn Layden: We were selling bundles of PS2 hardware and a movie copy of The Matrix. We chose the DVD format early on for PS2 to give us more memory, give us more real estate to build our games on. When it was ready for launch, we recognized that DVD was this emerging format and people were getting rid of their VHS player. I don't think there was a lot of intention around linking those two things, but serendipity is a great thing, right? Lucky happenstance. It turned out to be a huge accelerator because so many people could convince their spouse or their parents that, hey, this game machine, you can watch DVDs on it too.
IGN: Did you know early on that the PS2 would be a success?
Shawn Layden: It wasn't preordained. We launched PS2 on the back of Ridge Racer, Tekken and Fantavision, the fireworks simulator. Later on we became sanguine about it but, at that moment, it was like, 'Oh, dear God, are we going to be okay? We can't just sell three games for 10 years.' There was a learning curve, and so some teams took some time to figure out how this worked. The first couple of years of PS2 was fairly white-knuckled, riding it out, hoping that some more games are going to come, right? This is going to be awesome, right? The first year was pretty much fear-driven. Once teams got into the swing of it, the games were coming thick and fast. There was a lot of risk-taking, a lot of games where you'd look at it and go, 'What is that?' And you want to discover it.
IGN: How did it change the way gaming was viewed in wider society?
Shawn Layden: People started to accept gaming as not just a bunch of spotty-faced teenagers in the basement. PS2 was when gaming really broke out into a cultural phenomenon. It was the first time where you could talk about your game machine in polite company and not feel embarrassed. Before that, with PS1, you'd hear someone say Tomb Raider in a party, and you go, 'Oh, do you know Tomb Raider? Oh, that's amazing?' But with PS2, we're all out there. We're wearing logos on our t-shirts. We're having conversations at bars and at pubs and wherever about the new game we're playing.
When we launched The Getaway, we had a premiere in Leicester Square and we showed the 27-minute lead-up reel to the game. And it was like a full-on movie premiere, red carpet, the whole bit, those searchlights going up in the sky, The Times of London covering it. It did give the feeling that, wow, games are at the next level now. It's not just something happening down at Electronics Boutique – this is happening in Leicester Square.
IGN: Can you remember your first encounter with the PS2 console?
Daniel Griffiths: The call came that there's a big announcement in Japan. When my editor, Mike Goldsmith, went off [to Japan] we were speculating as to what it was going to be, but it wasn't certain it was going to be PS2. That issue, Ridge Racer Type 4 was the cover game, and then the announcement of PlayStation 2 is below that, because we weren't certain [it was going to happen].
Mike went to the PS2 reveal press conference. He's got no laptop, no computer. He gets given some slides and goes to some Japanese printer and tries to fax them, and he can't do it. Then he phones me. We've got our [Ridge Racer Type 4] front cover, the mag's all finished. The double spread of news is held back for whatever Mike's seeing in Japan. He's like, 'I've got PlayStation 2, I've seen it.' And we're like, 'Oh f*ck, what are we gonna do?'
He says, 'I'll describe to you what I've seen and you write it like you've seen it.' So he read from his notebook, and I literally typed up what he said just from his description. I'd never seen it, but I wrote the whole thing: 'We've been to Japan, we've seen this.'
IGN: What happened when you got your hands on it?
Daniel Griffiths: We had the first one in the UK, pretty much. [PlayStation Magazine owner] Future Publishing did football magazines and knitting magazines and canoeing magazines, even the people from the needlecraft magazines came to see [our] PlayStation 2. Everyone was just absolutely knocked out. There was a game called The Bouncer, with depth of field, there was focus and planes. It was incredible. And Fantavision had layers and clouds and the light would be reflected in things. All of these tricks that PS1 couldn't do, they just went all out on PS2. At the time it was photoreal to me, it was such a step up.
Because it was on DVD, the sound was so much better too. It had genuine music, and genuine spoken word and acting. Things like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, with Harry Gregson-Williams' orchestral score, and the fantastic, if slightly dubious, script and voice acting. It was next level. PS1 to PS2 was like going from a brick phone to an iPhone and you could see that everything's going to be brilliant from now on. The people that had held off on PlayStation 1 could see this wasn't going away.
IGN: How extravagant was the marketing?
Daniel Griffiths: PlayStation 2 was the time when the money landed, and spending lots of cash on nonsense made perfect sense. Nowadays, I don't think it exists at all. I remember going to one party where it was, 'Ladies and gentleman, Pulp.' They were 20 feet away, doing a full gig, and they were the hottest band at the time
For parties they would take over these weird venues, like derelict car parks, and they would put on art displays and have a stage and a band and an enormous free bar that was just Red Bull and Vodka all night, fill a place with cool people and games journalists, and everyone would just come out and say, 'Sony, they're the bomb.' I remember going to one and there was a perfect pyramid of gold chocolate coins, maybe 12 feet high… then on the way out, it was just demolished, and it had melted, and it was just a slick of chocolate, and people were slipping over on it. It was hilarious.
IGN: What happened when Microsoft entered the scene?
Daniel Griffiths: I had moved from OPM deputy editor to be editor of GamesMaster. I remember Microsoft coming to Future Publishing and they took some PC magazines and GamesMaster [staff] to a posh hotel in Bath. And they unzipped a case and produced this shiny metal box shaped like an X. They were in awe of us, that was the weird thing. They took me to one side and they said, 'We've seen how your games magazines have sold [games] to gamers, we're completely new to the games industry, we need you to be on side with this.' It seems crazy, but that's what it was.
They were running scared. You could see they were kind of like, 'This might be the biggest mistake we've ever made, but we're making a console.' PlayStation's marketing team had got it on the telly and in trendy magazines, and they had footballers banging on about their favorite PlayStation games in the press. It was everywhere… and so I think for Xbox to come in and say, 'We've got a console,' it was just like, you're gonna have to really prove it. And to their credit, they worked super hard, and I've got nothing but admiration for it.
IGN: When do you think PS2 cemented its reputation as an all-timer?
Daniel Griffiths: I think part of the reason it becomes loved is because of the mess that they made of PlayStation 3. PS1 was a games machine. PS2, with the advent of the DVD player, was home entertainment, and then PS3, god knows what they were thinking of. That was going to replace your computer, your television, your everything. The reason why PlayStation 2 is kind of revered is because they f*cked up PlayStation 3.
Do you have fond memories of the PlayStation 2? Were you there, 25 years ago, waiting in line to buy one at midnight? Did you get it for the DVD player, or for the cinematic narrative games that tech unlocked? Or were you a fan of its early advances in multiplayer, perhaps online with SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs, or splitscreen with Timesplitters 2 via the Multitap adaptor? Let us know your stories from the PS2 era in the comments below. And for more tales of the PS2, check out how Sony secured GTA as a PlayStation exclusive.
The interviews in this story have been edited for length and clarity.
