Making games “cool.” After 30 years of PlayStation , it’s sometimes tough to remember how much of a game changer the new platform was to the world at the tine. Sony, a new hardware competitor up against the already-established Sega and Nintendo, approached things with a new vision. According to a former PlayStation executive , one of the most important ways the company lapped the competition was by peddling its games and hardware with a flair for innovation. Just in time for the brand’s landmark anniversary, Sony lifer and a former chairman for PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden spoke with Eurogamer about the unorthodox and surprisingly successful ways Sony bullied its way into the gaming market in its early days. Layden explains that without a dedicated team for marketing games and brokering conversations with publishers and developers, Sony surprisingly leaned on employees in the company’s music division to reach new partners and audiences. “When they decided they were getting into the game business, they knew they had the technology, the engineers. [Sony] said 'Let's be honest, we sell electronics'. Sony knew that without entertainment DNA, we would not be successful,” Layden explained. “So the initial stage was made a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music.” Sony’s approach to marketing the original PlayStation was a game-changer for the games industry. Leaving that responsibility to people with almost zero game experience ended up being a major boon when presenting PlayStation as something avant-garde. Layden recalled “Sony Music guys” pulling up to the offices later than the engineering team “hungover, sunglasses, cigarettes hanging out their mouths.” The team would study the Japanese stock market for an hour before pursuing leads. While the charismatic group of mysteryious employees couldn’t be more different from the prim-and-proper hardware team innovating on the technical side of the console, the music team produced major results in its new role. “Those were the guys who would go out with the people at SquareSoft [known today as today SqureEnix] and ply them with whiskey until the wee hours of the morning to finally get Final Fantasy VII off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation,” Layden said. “That was really the 'oh my god' moment. 'Sony's really serious about this now.' And that's down to the music guys, the doggedness of just trying to get a deal over the line. They were amazing.” While some of it could be considered cringe today, earlier PlayStation marketing was a massive departure from how games were advertised in the mid to late 90s. Layden had joined Sony in 1987, nine years before the launch of the PlayStation. Layden would move to the PlayStation team in 1996, just a few years after the tech company shifted its CD-drive peripheral for Nintendo’s SNES to a fully-fledged console. The former executive said that top brass within Sony wasn’t convinced that the PlayStation would be the success it would become. “Within Sony, a lot of the leadership at the time didn't take it seriously,” he told Eurogamer . “They thought: ‘Oh my god, Sega and Nintendo own this thing [the console industry]. You think Sony’s going to come in sideways and try to divvy that thing up into a three-piece pie?’ It was a fool's errand.’” But snatching a piece of that pie took a gutsy move from Sony Music’s star team of cigarette-smoking dealmakers. At the time, both Nintendo and Sega used tried-and-true contemporary gaming marketing to sell games to younger audiences. Most games would show an action-packed art asset in print ads. Television ads were more creative , with live-action elements or even the occasional dig at the competition. But they mostly boiled down to what had worked well for years. Organized efforts to appeal to older players, like Nintendo’s “Play It Loud” ad campaign, came off as weird, inauthentic, and grating. Before PlayStation shook things up, there was no mistaking a commercial for video games for something more mainstream. While PlayStation had its fair share of edgy ads making fun of the other side (it was still the 90’s after all), it was also on the cutting edge of what was actually cool to wider audiences at the time. “Gaming advertising had been really straightforward,” Layden said. “But the advertising team at PlayStation came from Sony Music, so we were marketing games like you market rock bands - with a little of the mystery, a little of the sexy.” Layden pointed out the cover of games like the first Wipeout , which looked a lot like an EDM album cover. Television ads in Japan used music from then-popular U.S. bands like Chemical Brothers and Prodigy. Ads for games like Tomb Raider , Crash Bandicoot , and Wipeout helped make gaming cool to the mainstream. Of course, it also helped that these games were genuinely impressive and pretty fun to play. Conflating Wipeout’s gameplay with the party drugs was an edgy concerted effort to find a new audience for video games. And according to Shawn Layden, it worked. “We'd be going to clubs during that time and see PlayStation 1 kiosks with Wipeout in nightclubs,” Layden said. “You've got your vodka Red Bull in one hand, and you're playing Wipeout with the other. It was the beginnings of making gaming into a lifestyle, the beginnings of making it something where gaming is more than just a distraction.” “Gaming became less something whispered about in pubs and more you overhearing someone saying, ‘oh I'm playing Tomb Raider,” he concluded. The rest is , of course, history. Sony’s cutting-edge way of marketing games was replicated by Sega and Nintendo when advertising their next consoles. Microsoft would also take a similar approach when jumping into the gaming market with the first Xbox in 2001, targeting adults almost exclusively. It’s pretty metal to show nothing by an eyeball in a jar to advertise one of the most influential survival horror games ever. The tonal change of marketing across the games industry can also be credited to the advertising world catching up to the cultural shift of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But PlayStation was ahead of the curve in proving that the old ways of selling games had become archaic. It’s a cyclical occurrence in most of the entertainment world. Nintendo would change the game once more in the late 2000’s getting the likes of Beyoncé and Robin Williams playing its systems for TV commercials. For PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary Sony’s approach to game marketing was for its time. While some of it has aged poorly, there’s no denying how pivotal it was in changing the perception of gaming and the soon-to-be billion-dollar industry forever. And in many ways, that’s just as important as the iconic games we all remember fondly three decades later. Video Games Internet Culture PlayStationThe U.N. Climate Conference in Azerbaijan wraps up Friday. And as questions swirl about the role of the U.S. in climate negotiations ahead of Donald Trump's second term, a California delegation has been there weighing in. On Thursday, LAist 89.3 fill in host Julie Slater spoke with California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who was one of the leaders of that delegation. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. LAist: I want to start with the main goal of this year's conference, to fund developing countries who are on the front lines of the climate crisis. What's going on? Wade Crowfoot: Well, I'll just give you a little background first. You know, the United Nations is a really important platform for climate change action because, of course, this is a global challenge, right? We all share the same atmosphere. And so every year, the U. N. brings virtually all the countries in the world together to update the treaty that it's organized to combat climate change. This year, one of the primary areas of focus is finance. In other words, how does the world help fund countries in the Global South that really need to make a lot of changes, both to reduce pollution and protect their people, but don't have the resources. So that is a very big topic and, when I was there for several days, there were promising conversations about shifting resources to those countries, but no agreement as of yet. LAist: Donald Trump will soon return to the White House. Of course, last time he was in office, he pulled out of the Paris Agreement. Joe Biden rejoined when he took office. What is the role of the U.S. in this climate conference? WC: The world has definitely taken notice of the U.S. election and what it means for climate action in the United States. And I think most around the world anticipate that the incoming president will do something similar [to what] he did the first time around, as you mentioned. So it's really important that California and other American states were there with other countries and other people around the world. And our main message is [that] America is still in. 24 states have governors and legislatures that are driving forward on climate action, really led by California. We represent 55% of the population and 60% of our national GDP. And so the message we have for folks is there's still going to be plenty of action to combat climate change, despite this incoming president. LAist: What can California do on the world stage to push for climate action, even if U.S. policy looks like it will soon pull it back? WC: First of all, we're a pretty important proof point. We're a big economy. We would be the fifth largest economy in the world measured by our GDP. We're also one of the most ambitious in terms of reducing pollution and actually achieving our climate targets. So a lot of what we do at this international conference is share what we've done in California and what's working. Now, it's not to say everything's perfect in California. Far from it. And of course, we have challenges around making this transition. But we have a good news to tell, which is we've been able to cut carbon pollution while growing clean energy jobs. And that economic message is particularly important because other countries around the world want to make this transition, but they want to do it in a way that works for their economy. And in California, we can demonstrate that actually these climate policies have brought new industries, growing industries to California. And that's important. LAist: Would you say overall that you thought there was forward momentum? Is there something positive coming out of the climate conference from your opinion? WC: Definitely, progress is being made with this UN effort. You're seeing more renewables come online across the world and certainly across the U. S. You're seeing some really interesting technologies expand in transportation. You're seeing more electric vehicles and zero emission vehicles on the road. You're also seeing a lot of action to restore nature, which is a key part of stabilizing our climate. I think the big question is how quickly are we moving versus how quickly do we have to move? And the fact is that most of the world is not on track to meet the commitments they've already made. And given accelerating climate change, that's a real problem. So my mantra is we have to move further and faster and we have no time to waste.
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While on the campaign trail in 2015, former President Donald Trump promised to forgo his entire presidential salary if elected. “As far as the salary is concerned, I won’t take even $1. I’m totally giving up my salary if I become president,” Trump, who will serve again as president beginning in January 2025, said in a September 2015 video posted on X , formerly Twitter. The president is required by federal law to receive a $400,000 annual salary . When Trump took office his then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump planned to donate that money , according to multiple media reports. After Trump’s reelection in November 2024, multiple VERIFY readers asked us if the former president fulfilled his promise to donate his salary. Here’s what we found. Did Donald Trump donate any of his salary during his first term as president? Yes, Donald Trump appears to have donated most of his presidential salary. During his first term, Donald Trump appears to have donated his presidential salary on a quarterly basis in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and at least a portion of it in 2020, according to spokespersons for the Trump administration, multiple federal agencies and various news reports. VERIFY was not able to independently confirm all of the salary donations from sources outside of the Trump administration. We found independent proof of the donations or photos of checks in some cases, while other salary donations were only confirmed by Trump’s former press secretaries or administration leaders at the time. Here’s what we can VERIFY about Trump’s presidential salary donations. 2017 In 2017, Trump gave $78,000 to the National Park Service (NPS) and $100,000 to the Department of Education. The Trump administration said he also donated his quarterly salary to the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Transportation (DOT) that same year. The president’s quarter salary would be $100,000, though administration officials did not specify an exact amount in these cases. Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s office confirmed Trump’s salary donation of $78,333 to the NPS in a press release on April 3, 2017 . That donation went toward two restoration projects at the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, the National Park Service (NPS) said in July 2017 . A spokesperson for the Department of Education also confirmed to VERIFY via email on Dec. 2, 2024, that Trump donated $100,000 to the agency in July 2017. The White House said at the time that the funds would be “used to host a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)-focused camp for students.” Trump’s quarterly salary donations to HHS and DOT in 2017 were announced during White House press briefings with former press secretary Sarah Sanders and agency officials. The salary donation to HHS would be put toward the “planning and design of a large-scale public awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid addiction,” Acting HHS Secretary Eric Hargan said during a briefing on Nov. 30, 2017 . Trump’s salary donation to the DOT was earmarked for the department’s INFRA grant programs, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said during a briefing on Feb. 13, 2018 . INFRA grants fund projects that are aimed at improving the “safety, efficiency and reliability” of various transportation systems at the national and regional level, the DOT says . VERIFY reached out to HHS for further confirmation of Trump’s salary donations, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. The DOT referred us to Trump’s presidential transition team, who has not responded to VERIFY’s request for comment. 2018 Trump donated his salary in 2018 to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Small Business Administration (SBA), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to various sources. DHS and the NIAAA received $100,000 each, though VERIFY was not able to confirm the exact amount of money given to the VA and SBA. Trump’s quarterly salary donation to the VA was announced during a White House press briefing on May 17, 2018 . The VA had “already earmarked” Trump’s donation “for caregiver support in the form of mental health and peer support programs, financial aid, education training and research,” former acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said during that briefing. Linda McMahon, former head of the SBA, released a statement upon receiving Trump’s salary donation on Oct. 4, 2018 . The gift would “assist the SBA with creating a seven-month intensive entrepreneur training program for veterans,” McMahon said at the time. According to an Associated Press report published on Jan. 25, 2019 , the White House said Trump donated $100,000 to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). DHS confirmed that Trump donated $100,000 to the agency when it shared a redacted copy of a check dated March 12, 2019. VERIFY reached out to the VA and SBA for further confirmation of Trump’s salary donations, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. The NIAAA referred us to the Biden White House press office. 2019 Trump donated $100,000 each to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Surgeon General’s Office, as well as $200,000 to HHS in 2019, according to various sources. Agri-Pulse , a news outlet covering farm and food policy, reported on Trump’s $100,000 donation to the USDA on May 16, 2019, citing a White House official. Trump’s contribution would be put toward “outreach programs that benefit farmers,” Agri-Pulse reported at the time. Former deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere announced Trump’s donation to the Surgeon General’s Office in an X post on Aug. 16, 2019 . Deere’s post linked out to a USA Today article that said the $100,000 salary donation would “fund an upcoming public health advisory,” according to the White House. Officials did not elaborate on the subject of the public health advisory at the time. A White House official told the Associated Press in November 2019 that Trump donated his third-quarter salary of $100,000 to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health (OASH), a federal agency under HHS which oversees federal public health offices and programs. The White House said the funds were earmarked “to continue the ongoing fight against the opioid crisis.” Trump’s then- Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in an X post on March 3, 2020 that his final 2019 salary donation would go to HHS to “support the efforts being undertaken to confront, contain and combat coronavirus.” McEnany shared a photo of a $100,000 check from Trump written out to OASH, dated Jan. 29, 2020. VERIFY reached out to the USDA, Surgeon General’s Office and HHS for confirmation of Trump’s salary donations, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. 2020 Trump donated his salary to HHS and the National Park Service (NPS) in 2020, according to his administration. His first-quarter salary donation to HHS would “help in the development of new therapeutics to treat COVID-19 infections,” former deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said in an X post on May 22, 2020 . VERIFY could not find further confirmation of this donation. In an X post on Aug. 14, 2020 , Trump shared an image of a check for $100,000 made out to the NPS and dated July 13, 2020. He said the donation would “help repair and restore our great national monuments.” Former Department of the Interior Secretary David Bernhardt reposted Trump’s message , writing, “Following @realDonaldTrump ’s enactment of the greatest conservation funding legislation in U.S. history, he has again demonstrated his unwavering commitment to improving our national parks, public lands, and monuments.” The Department of the Interior oversees NPS. VERIFY reached out to HHS for confirmation of Trump’s salary donation but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Trump salary donation announcements stopped at the end of his term For Trump’s first three-and-a-half years in office, his administration publicly announced the quarterly salary donations. But those donation announcements stopped in the middle of 2020. The White House never said if Trump donated the last $220,000 of his salary, which covered “the final six months of 2020 and the first 20 days of 2021,” according to a report from The Washington Post published in July 2021 . Trump’s 2017 , 2018 and 2019 tax returns show that he reported charitable contributions. But those tax returns don’t show where that money went. Trump did not report any charitable contributions on his 2020 tax return . VERIFY reached out to Trump’s presidential transition team for clarity and to ask if Trump plans to donate his salary again during his second term, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. Trump isn’t the only president to donate his presidential salary. Former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover also donated their earnings while in office. Former President Barack Obama donated more than $1 million to charity while he was president, Forbes reported in February 2017 .The Future of Gaming: Dell Outlet’s Untapped Potential
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