Mark Cerny

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Mark Evan Cerny (born August 24, 1964) is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and entertainment executive.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cerny graduated from The College Preparatory School and attended UC Berkeley. As president of Cerny Games, which he founded in 1998, he acts as a consultant in the video game industry.

In 2004, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Game Developers Association, and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 2010.

In the mid 2010s, Cerny served as the lead architect and producer of Sony's PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita video game consoles.

Personal life

While working under Sega in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, Cerny learned Japanese. He met his future wife in Japan, who helped him to establish Cerny Games, which she continues to manage.

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Career

As a youth, Mark Cerny grew up in San Francisco and was a huge fan of computer games and arcade games. He had attended University of California, Berkeley, but when he was 17 in 1982, he was invited to join Atari and dropped out of school for the opportunity. On January 18, 1982, he began working in Atari's arcade division. Teams were small in the early days of professional game development, and each member was responsible for a broader variety of positions than today. He appeared on Millipede and Owen Rubin on Major Havoc.

Cerny's first big success was marble Madness, in which he served as both a programmer and co-programmer. He became involved in video game hardware during this period, which Cerny found much simpler than his later work with the PlayStation. He joined Sega in Japan at the start of the 1980s and later returned to the United States by 1991 to help establish the Sega Technical Institute. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was one of several Master System and Genesis builds while at a university in the United States.

Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join the newly formed Crystal Dynamics. He appeared on 3DO games, including Crash 'n Burn (1993) and Total Eclipse (1994). Cerny was instrumental in helping Crystal Dynamics become the first American developer to purchase a PlayStation development kit from Sony Computer Entertainment, having traveled to Japan to talk to Shuhei Yoshida, who was then a young executive within Sony. Cerny left the studio to lead Universal Pictures' newly formed multimedia group despite the fact that the kit had been delivered to Crystal Dynamics by 1994.

Cerny was involved with Universal Interactive Studios, a newly formed division of Universal for video games that Cerny described as a "boutique publisher." Cerny began as a vice president of product research and later became its president. Cerny had a good deal of autonomy with the split, saying, "Universal didn't really know the company, and as a result, I had a massive bag of money to invest and no supervision." Universal Interactive Studios recruited two small and new development studios to develop for the PlayStation, aided by his prior participation in Sony's Naughty Dog and two-person Insomniac Games. They were introduced to create Way of the Warrior and had signed on for three additional titles in the case of Naughty Dog. Cerny was involved in the release of Crash Bandicoot, Sony's next game, which was released in 1996. Insomniac had completed their first game Disruptor and Cerny assisted them in planning their new game, Spyro the Dragon, which had also been picked up and published by Sony in 1998. When Naughty Dog and Insomniac's contracts with Universal came to an end, the two studios decided to continue to produce PlayStation games. Cerny remained in constant contact with both teams after. Universal had financial issues in 1998 that resulted in a layoff of work on the Interactive Studios group. Cerny decided to leave Universal to become an advisor for Cerny Games, which would enable him to continue working with Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Sony.

Around 1999, Sony was assembling the PlayStation 2's electronics. Yoshida, the current product designer, contacted Cerny about assisting in the design of a graphics engine for the new console. Cerny accepted and spent three months in Japan over a three-month period, becoming the first American to work on the PlayStation 2. Cerny's first PlayStation 2 game, Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and Ratchet & Clank, as well as many other sequels in the series that followed, was completed once the engine was complete. Cerny's "Method" game design scheme emerged from his play of "dos and don'ts" in the game industry during this period. Cerny's Method has since become a common feature in the video game industry.

Cerny will continue his research with Sony. Yoshida had been promoted to vice president of product research at Sony Computer Entertainment America, where the development of Sony's next console, the PlayStation 3, had started. As to minimize the burden and cost for developers, Yoshida brought Cerny to help plan out a way for the new console to include some of the same functionality as the previous consoles. Cerny collaborated with Sony and Naughty Dog to create the Initiative for a Common Engine (ICE) Team, with part of the team that worked closely with Sony's hardware engineers in Japan to bring Yoshida's vision. Although some of the ICE Team's objectives were fulfilled, the PlayStation 3's latest core hardware, the Cell, was impossible to work with. Cerny continued to assist Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their first PlayStation 3 games, including God of War III and Killzone 3.

Around 2007, Sony was looking forward to the successor to the PlayStation 3, which had not met Sony's sales goals in comparison to Microsoft's Xbox 360, and had contributed to Ken Kutaragi's demise from Sony. According to a review of the PlayStation 3's development, either the next console will be kept with the Cell processor or migrate to a x86-based architecture similar to personal computers. Although the x86 scheme would make certain aspects of development much more convenient, Cerny told Sony that this would be unfavorable to the first-party developers because it would prevent them from accessing low-level applications that had been used for extracting as much performance from the console. Cerny spent a significant amount of time in November 2007 researching the history of the x86 architecture and then suggested that he take over the lead development role for the forthcoming PlayStation based on what he had learned so that the next console would be more developer-friendly when using the x86 architecture. Yoshida agreed, which caused Sony's top management to convince Cerny to remain a consultant while being named as the PlayStation 4's lead designer. Cerny's PlayStation 4's upgrade is considered significant, given that it led to the console's success of over 100 million units sold by 2019, trailing only the PlayStation 2 in lifetime sales. Cerny was behind the development of Knack, one of PlayStation 4's launch games, as well as its sequel.

Cerny remained as the lead designer on Sony's forthcoming consoles, including the handheld PlayStation Vita and the PlayStation 5. Cerny said that his consultant status gave him freedom that being a Sony engineer does not have, such as the ability to work with many groups within Sony and its first-party studios for improving the PlayStation layout. He also continued to assist in game development for several of Sony's first-party titles, including The Last Guardian, Marvel's Spider-Man, and Death Stranding. Cerny has been on a two-year cycle since the PlayStation 4's introduction in 2009, where he visited most of Sony's first-party developers and other key studios to find out what problems they have with the latest hardware and what they would like to see out of future hardware. These visits may have resulted in mid-generation hardware upgrades or improved apps, or they may have been used to map the next generation of hardware.

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