Dim the lights. Shut the blinds – things are about to get risky. You're about to boot up Madden NFL 2001.
This is the scene Sony executives might have imagined while they, in the early PlayStation days, planned their marketing campaigns around what former PlayStation marketing head Geoff Glendenning thought was "fucking cool," as he says in a recent interview with The Game Business.
"I was clubbing at the time," he explains.
Glendenning says the allure of chic, cigarette-smoking club rats led Sony to setting up "PlayStation rooms" in 52 nightclubs, and visuals in, apparently, 500 nightclubs. The company was also involved in wild, seductive activities such as "downhill mountain biking, BMX, snakeboarding, breakdancing, graffiti. I mean, we were absolutely – and fashion – absolutely everywhere," he adds.
PR lead at now-closed Wipeout developer Psygnosis Glen O'Connell agrees, saying PlayStation was taking "games into places that were almost quite dangerous," namely clubs where games "could be associated with alcohol, drug taking… anything."
"There were connotations at the time of, you know, nightclubs are evil, dangerous, drug taking, all the things that are going on. And we were inserting games into that place," O'Connell says.
Now, it all sounds sort of funny, like talking to your parents about when they were teenagers. It's hard to picture PlayStation as anything other than part of a picture-perfect, multi-billion dollar corporation. But, remember – the early 2000s when the PS1 launched were untamed days of PlayStation brand flavored condoms, where ads for even an unassuming racing game like Wipeout featured PG-13 gore, for some reason. They were even "cool," sometimes.
