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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold
I know something that I'm sure a lot of you don't. Is it the secrets of
the American military? I’m not the Chinese government, so no. It's the
fact that Fran Drescher, on the final episode of her show The Nanny, bought
the entire cast a Sony PlayStation. This is just one of the many recent
examples of gaming’s push into the mass media. But the sad thing is, none
of this would have happened without a company that many people know and
love: Sony.
Yes, Sony. Makers of the PlayStation. Creators of the much-hyped
PlayStation 2. And, without a doubt, the single most successful console
maker of all time. In the heyday of 16-bit systems, you would have never
seen a celebrity or a pro sports player touting their skills happily on a
Super Nintendo or Genesis. Heck, those same celebrities would have
probably had their careers ruined if they had been caught playing a Sega
Saturn. But now PlayStation "skillz" are becoming a status symbol of sorts.
Why that is, plus Andy Rooney, tonight on 60 Minutes.
At first it seemed like a noble business venture. A mega-conglomorate
Japanese company entering the monopolized video game market, a market
struggling to be more than a toy. I spoke with the Director of Human
Resources at Sony, Jonathan Walimaki, about Sony’s recent success. "I
think one reason Nintendo was so successful was that they were literally
the only brand that appealed to young children, which at the time was the
industry's primary audience," Walimaki said. He went on, "At first many
executives at Sony thought it was a fluke. But hey, we're Sony! We can do
whatever we want..."
That fluke has turned into a best-selling, multi-billion dollar
industry for Sony. What was first a fluke, is now the main, and sometimes
only subject at Sony Corporation's executive meetings.
Nintendo of America's Chairman Howard Lincoln agreed to speak with us
about video gaming's rise into pop-culture superstardom. "Sony was, and
I’ll admit it, a big help for us," Lincoln stated. He continued, "I'm not
going to lie and say that the Nintendo 64 survived on its own. The new
users of video games, the ones that bought the PlayStation as their first
ever gaming system, are some of the ones who wanted a little more."
And that "little more," he said, was an N64. A large name brand, but
not a hot-seller by PlayStation standards.
So you know that Sony was almost singlehandedly responsible for taking
video games into the mass media. In fact, I uttered those same exact lines
earlier in the broadcast. But what you don’t know is how. We spoke with
BJ Larue, the president of Sony’s PlayStation advertising company,
Chiat/Day, about this. Larue said, "Sony came to us one day in '94 and
said they needed a campaign for a video game system. We immediately
thought to copy Nintendo's ads, since that's a guaranteed way to get kids."
But then they showed him the games. From these early glimpses at titles
on the PlayStation, they knew it wouldn’t be your seven-year-old's gaming
system.
With those words, Chiat/Day set our to create an edgy campaign, one with
brief glimpses at games, a dark overtone, and a forboding voice claiming
to the world "URNOTE" or, in layman's terms, "YOU ARE NOT READY." Larue
said, "It was a risky campaign, yes. But at the same time, it was
something that had been done almost never before in the history of
commercials. Teaser ads were familiar then, but dark ones?"
It was a risk in the business Sony was not really ready to take. At
first they suggested, in The Chiat/Day executive's own words, "A blue,
polygonal talking head who floated around yelling crap about the
PlayStation in people’s faces. Oh, he was talking in Japanese, too, so
there were these whacked out subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Not
the campaign you want to grab customers."
Sony’s gamble with the dark "URNOTE" ads payed off. Some 100,000
consumers, not really knowing what to expect come launch day, pre-ordered
the machine as well as a handful of games each. "Even we didn’t expect
that kind of response, and we were the ones who made the ads these people
were responding to," Larue said.
And as time went on, more and more amazing PlayStation ads came up,
all from the minds of the creators of the Taco Bell dog. Larue said, "I
think the Crash Bandicoot ads, where he had the bullhorn in front of
Nintendo’s headquarters touting his game to the people there really put us
over the top, really got the PlayStation ads accepted by the masses."
Which brings up another important fact. Sony’s success wasn’t
completely Sony/Chiat/Day-induced. Nintendo's reliance on child-oriented
games and ads would ultimately be their undoing, leaving Sony as the only
system focused toward the ever-important age bracket of 14-24 ("Generation
Y"), the same age bracket Sega is targeting with the Dreamcast.
Nintendo's Howard Lincoln has admitted that "focusing on kids with our
games and our advertising wasn’t the best idea. Of course, it wasn’t the
worst idea either, as sales number indicate." While Howard Lincoln may be
happy with the Nintendo 64 marketing strategy, consumers certainly weren’t.
Web pages and newsgroups were flooded with statements of outrage towards
Nintendo’s kiddie focusing, and recently there have been statements made
that even suggest that Nintendo was made "Sony’s B----" by relying on
children to buy their system.
When you really look back on the whole PlayStation ordeal, Chiat/Day
was the most influential in taking it into the mass market. Selling
over 50 million systems in the past four years was not an easy feat for
Sony. Don’t expect the Dreamcast or even the PlayStation 2 to be as
influential to pop culture as the PlayStation was. In fact, don’t expect
to see as many Dreamcasts or PlayStation 2s in the Hummers of sports
players as there are PlayStations. Sony’s success with the PlayStation not
only made a crap-load of money for them, but it made gaming a respectable
hobby. It also made video games the pop culture powerhouse they are today.
Legal Note: Master Gamer is in no way affiliated with the TV show 60
Minutes and of all the quotes in this article were made up. But you
already knew that, didn't you?
Send Rob an e-mail at rob@mastergamer.com
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