With PlayStation celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of their first system, many employees, former and current, have started telling stories and reflecting on their time and experience with the companies. Eurogamer recently got the opportunity to sit with former chief at PlayStation, Shawn Layden, who spoke with them about his experiences and obstacles that came their way when developing the PlayStation 3.

We had PS1, PS2… and now we’re building a supercomputer! And we’re going to put Linux on it! And we’re going to do all these sorts of things! We flew too close to the sun and we were lucky and happy to have survived the experience, but it taught us a lot.

And going to PS4, we learned things like: buy it, don’t build it, if you can. You can manage the cost better. You can argue with vendors, get better deals instead of building your own thing.

The PlayStation 4 currently sits as Sony and PlayStation’s 2nd best selling console and the 5th highest selling console of all time. Layden spoke further about the fact that the team chose to ensure that the “center” focus of the PlayStation 4 was gaming and not streaming or playing movies.

Just make it the best game machine of all time. I think that’s what really made the difference. When PS4 came out, it set us against what Xbox was trying to do. [They wanted to] build more of a multimedia experience, and we just wanted to build a kick-ass game machine.

Although the PlayStation 3 did sell as initially well as Sony and PlayStation wanted it to (landing it as the 4th best selling console for PlayStation’s at home console in the company’s history), but it taught both companies a lot of valuable lessons that helped pave the way for the future of their systems.