"You have to get me Vib-Ribbon," he said. That very day, on the E3 show floor, he hunted down David Thach, Sony's director of international game development. Sonyīut Layden, as president of SCEA, could now do something about it. And he was tasked with talking about the boring stuff that tanks any modern gaming "press conference"-sales numbers.Ī collection of Internet reactions to the Vib-Ribbon E3 non-announcement. American gamers didn't know him from Adam. He'd been at PlayStation for 18 years, but all of it was spent in London or Tokyo. The only wild card this year was Layden, the newcomer. Now, the conferences were rehearsed to precision. Millions of PlayStation faithful around the world watched on live streaming video.īad press conferences could live on in infamy, as Sony well knew following the tin-eared, gaffe-filled bungle it made of its PlayStation 3 launch years before. Fans lined up outside a sports arena to get primo seating to watch suited executives announce new games, which played on massive screens bigger than two IMAXes stitched together. What had begun as a tiny gathering of tech reporters in a hotel ballroom two decades prior had turned into a colossal pep rally. And, well, "press conference" wasn't really the way to describe it. He'd become the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America in April, just months before the company's annual Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference. Shawn Layden just wanted to make a good first impression.