There once was a time when Jason Scott worked in technical support at Psygnosis, and he has been reminiscing about his days working at the dawn of the original PlayStation console.  The company chose to target the club scene in North America when it began marketing its new product, and being part of that scene apparently meant trying to fit in with what the crazy club kids were doing with their loud music and energy drinks.  Here's a stunning bit of the story in which Scott recalls just how deep into the clubs the marketers were willing to go in order to be real straight legit in that crazy '90s way:

In one of my many wanderings, I’d sometimes go through the pile of marketing materials just to see the cool little weird ideas that the gang was coming up with. And by “the gang”, I mean “the gang in Europe”, because the US office had very little pull and would often just be sent things out of the blue. Marketing, in other words, ended up mostly being “Sales” and being an american phone number to call when a magazine needed more original artwork sent over.

So there I am, going through the stuff, and I found a small cache of Playstation material. And in that Playstation material, among the Wipeout promotions and “U R NOT E” sloganeering, was this perforated paper, light cardboard really, with the Playstation logo.

It kind of confused me; who’d want some cardboard logo which was hundreds of tiny squares combined in a grid to form a Playstation Logo? Then it hit me.

BLOTTER PAPER.

SONY MARKETING HAD CREATED ACID BLOTTER PAPER TO BE HANDED OUT AT CLUBS.

I didn’t keep it; I just put it back in the pile. I think in one moment I saw the level of desperation Sony would achieve in marketing the Playstation, the no-holds-barred level they’d go to get the Playstation logo out there. I have no idea how the whole thing would work, how you’d hand this blotter paper to the right people, how you’d leave it somewhere for folks to find, how you could possibly, ever, think this was a good idea. But someone did, and I saw in all this some of the face of how insane things had gotten.

I had no idea that Fringe's Walter Bishop once worked for Sony.  You are not ready, indeed.    We've looked back on some bizarre marketing campaigns over the years (and Sony has had more of its fair share of them), but official PlayStation blotter paper is a new level of crazy.  Why not take things all the way to the next level with official Nintendo 'shrooms and authentic Microsoft Xboxtacy tabs (they come in groups of 360)?

(via Metafilter)