![]() ![]() Meanwhile, Deering says that the company still wanted to embrace a broad audience, including more mature demographics. If you're older, you harken back on your teenage years." ![]() We use the age of 17 as kind of the target of the bullseye, with the theory that everybody under 17 aspires to be 17 because of an older sibling or you're going to have your driver's licence. Tretton says that for the US launch, Sony's target audience was 17 year-olds: "We had the exact audience in mind for PlayStation 2 that we did for PlayStation because it was so well targeted. A lot of people understood what PlayStation was then and we needed to start converting them into PlayStation 2 users, and then get more people into the platform to grow it as we started to move on." Chris Deering We wanted to drive it up on PlayStation and make it a little bit older still, with content that was noticeably better on PlayStation 2. We didn't want to be in Nintendo's space. "Part of the job was go to a slightly older demographic. "It was chalk and cheese in terms of what you got. "It was just amazing to see the potential PlayStation 2 had over PlayStation in both functionality and design," then SCE UK & Ireland boss Ray Maguire says. This was part of the reason why Twin Peaks creator David Lynch was hired to make the unsurprisingly bizarre The Third Place trailer. For the PS2, however, SCE wanted to bring in a more mature audience. There was promotion aimed at bringing kids on board, like the goofy and colourful Society Against PlayStation commercials, as well as marketing like the rather gruesome print ad featuring two women with bleeding noses for WipEout. The original PlayStation had been targeted towards a broad audience. There was a great deal of trepidation not to get caught up in our success and to make sure that we redoubled our efforts going into the next generation." Going into PlayStation 2, we were certainly confident, but we were also cautious because it was very rare that the leader of one generation could hold that position in the next. We had set the bar high but it really exceeded our expectations. Jack Tretton, who was heading up SCE US, adds: "Everybody was euphoric coming off the success of PlayStation. "We were cautious because it was very rare that the leader of one generation could hold that position in the next" Jack Tretton "If PlayStation was ever successful, the real proof would be to have the follow up come out and do as well or maybe better." "It was always in the back of my mind," says Chris Deering, who was Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) Europe's boss at the time. Going into the PlayStation 2's launch, there was a degree of trepidation among Sony's leaders, all of whom had been in the industry for a while and knew what a fickle beast it could be. In March 1999, Sony told investors that it had shipped 54.42 million consoles, a figure that went north of 70 million over the following 12 months.īut the people heading up Sony's brand new video game venture knew that it wasn't enough to just do well the once - you needed to land another smash hit in the bag before you could consider yourself successful. What started as a collaborative project with Nintendo in the late '80s soon turned into its own product, taking the market by storm in 1994 in Japan and much of the rest of the world the following year. It's rare for a company to have such a strong entry into the games market as Sony did with the original PlayStation.
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