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Game changer: Jim Ryan

Jim Ryan
Words by Peter Anderson
Photography by Andrew Lowe

Newcastle-born Jim Ryan played a pivotal role in PlayStation’s rise from ambitious challenger to global entertainment powerhouse. Across three decades, he helped transform the brand into a dominant force in a sector once ruled by rivals Sega and Nintendo, with his own meteoric ascent culminating in his appointment as Sony Interactive Entertainment president and chief executive. Yet despite leading an international operation spanning California, Tokyo and London, the ex-Royal Grammar School Newcastle pupil never lost sight of the region that shaped him. Here, he talks to Peter Anderson about the values that underpinned his success, steering the launch of the blockbuster PlayStation 5 console during a global pandemic and why retirement has brought him back home.

Back in 1994, Britain was in the midst of a cultural renaissance.

Oasis burst onto the music scene with Definitely Maybe; Kevin Keegan’s swashbuckling Entertainers side secured Newcastle United’s highest top-flight finish since 1927; the newly-opened Channel Tunnel promised stronger European ties and the National Lottery launched to great fanfare.

While the nation was embracing its new era of optimism, a Japanese electronics giant was preparing for another kind of awakening.

Eyeing a place in the home video games market, it was set to launch the PlayStation.

Few could have foreseen the revolution it was about to spark.

In the same year, Newcastle-raised Jim Ryan, whose career had already taken him to Ford Motor Company, Amstrad and Oracle Corporation, joined the fledgling venture as international finance officer.

Over the next three decades, both would exceed even their most ambitious expectations as, much like the soundtrack to the era, things would soon go supersonic.

Yet when Jim joined Sony, PlayStation was very much “the new kid on the block”, entering a fiercely competitive market with no guarantee of success and everything still to prove.

He says: “People look at PlayStation now and assume it was always going to be successful, but back then we were the renegades, taking on some very established competitors.”

Jim joined Sony just a year before the launch of the original PlayStation in Europe, and found himself tasked with building a brand from the ground up.

He says: “There were about 20 people in the UK and nothing across continental Europe.

“My job was to create the infrastructure – find offices, hire people and build teams.

“We were starting from scratch.”

The challenge was considerable.

At the time, the video games market was dominated by established players Sega and Nintendo, whose flagship characters Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario had become cultural icons among a generation of young gamers.

Sony, by contrast, was attempting to break into an industry where it had no track record and little credibility.

Yet PlayStation arrived at precisely the right moment.

While rivals continued to rely on cartridge-based systems, Sony embraced CD-ROM technology, allowing developers to create larger, more cinematic games with richer soundtracks, voice acting and increasingly sophisticated graphics.

Just as importantly, the company deliberately targeted an older audience, positioning gaming not simply as a pastime for children but as a mainstream form of entertainment for teenagers and young adults.

Jim says: “The technology was different, but so was the attitude.

“It felt fresh. It felt contemporary.”

Sony also attracted some of the industry’s most talented developers, resulting in a catalogue of games that helped redefine what a console could be.

Titles such as Ridge Racer, Tekken, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, the latter led by heroine Lara Croft, showcased the system’s capabilities and offered experiences unlike anything many players had encountered before.

Jim says: “When Tomb Raider arrived, we got a real sense that something special was happening.

“It’s difficult to explain now just how huge that game was.

“The same was true of Resident Evil; those games felt completely different.”

As PlayStation’s popularity grew, so too did Jim’s responsibilities.

Having helped establish Sony’s European operation, he found himself at the centre of the company’s international expansion, taking the brand into new markets where video gaming was still in its infancy, before becoming president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in 2011.

Spain proved one of PlayStation’s greatest success stories.

Jim recalls how the console became so ubiquitous that many people used the word PlayStation as shorthand for video games themselves.

The same pattern would repeat elsewhere as PlayStation expanded across Europe and beyond, gradually eclipsing its rivals and transforming gaming from a niche hobby into a mainstream global industry.

In countries such as Saudi Arabia, where video games were one of the few widely accessible forms of entertainment, PlayStation and titles such as football game FIFA attracted vast audiences.

Jim says: “We were finding success in places where there wasn’t much of a gaming culture.

“We were building something that was becoming much bigger than any of us had ever imagined.”

“PEOPLE LOOK AT PLAYSTATION NOW AND ASSUME IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE SUCCESSFUL, BUT BACK THEN WE WERE THE RENEGADES, TAKING ON SOME VERY ESTABLISHED COMPETITORS”

While rivals often relied on a handful of signature franchises, Jim believes PlayStation’s success came from its ability to continually reinvent itself.

He says: “With PlayStation, there always tended to be one or two defining games for each generation.

“For the original PlayStation, it was games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, then Grand Theft Auto became huge on PlayStation 2.

“After that, FIFA and Call of Duty just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Alongside blockbuster third-party titles, Sony increasingly invested in its own studios, creating a portfolio of exclusive games that helped define each new console generation.

Jim says: “We were making these wonderful single-player experiences like Uncharted, The Last of Us and Ghost of Tsushima.

“They became what I used to think of as tent poles for the platform – games that would come along for each generation and really define what PlayStation was all about.”

By the late 2010s, PlayStation had become far more than a games console.

It was one of the world’s most recognisable entertainment brands, with tens of millions of players across the globe and a growing presence in film, television and digital services.

In 2019, Jim was appointed president and chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment, becoming head of the global PlayStation business and taking responsibility for a company employing 12,000 people and generating billions of dollars in revenue.

Yet within months of taking on what he describes as “the best job in the world”, he would face the greatest challenge of his career.

The launch of the PlayStation 5 had always been a monumental undertaking. And then the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill.