36 Facts About Mark Cerny

Mark Evan Cerny is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and media proprietor.

Mark Cerny has since frequently collaborated with Sony Interactive Entertainment as a consultant, including being the lead designer for hardware of several PlayStation consoles, being called the architect of the PlayStation Vita, PS4 and PS5.

Mark Cerny has consulted with Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games since their creation in the 1990s, as well as other Sony first-party studios like Sucker Punch Productions.

Mark Cerny has developed several games, notably the arcade game Marble Madness and the Knack series, and credited on many more for his consulting work.

Mark Cerny grew up in San Francisco, and was a fan of computer programming and arcade games as a youth.

Mark Cerny 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.

Mark Cerny started working in Atari's arcade division on January 18,1982.

Mark Cerny first worked with Ed Logg on Millipede and Owen Rubin on Major Havoc.

Mark Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join the newly formed Crystal Dynamics.

Mark Cerny initially worked on 3DO games including Crash 'n Burn and Total Eclipse.

Mark Cerny was instrumental in helping Crystal Dynamics become the first American developer to secure a PlayStation development kit from Sony Computer Entertainment, having gone to Japan to negotiate the deal with Shuhei Yoshida, at that point a young executive within Sony.

From 1994 to 1998, Mark Cerny was involved with Universal Interactive Studios, a newly formed division of Universal for video games that Mark Cerny described as a "boutique publisher".

Mark Cerny was initially a vice president of product development and later became its president.

Mark Cerny had been given a good amount of freedom with the division, stating "The best part about this was that Universal didn't really know the business and as a result I had a great big bag of money to spend and no supervision".

Mark Cerny helped with their next title, Crash Bandicoot, which Sony picked up to publish in 1996.

Insomniac similarly had completed their first title Disruptor and Mark Cerny helped them prepare the next game, Spyro the Dragon, which was picked up and published by Sony in 1998.

Mark Cerny opted to leave Universal to become consultant under his own company, Mark Cerny Games, that would allow him to keep working with Naughty Dog, Insomniac and Sony.

Yoshida, now executive producer of product development, contacted Mark Cerny about helping to develop a graphics engine for the new console.

Mark Cerny accepted, and worked in Japan over a three-month span, being the first American to work on the PlayStation 2.

Mark Cerny's Method has since become a standard practice in the video game development industry.

Yoshida again brought Mark Cerny to help plan out a means for the new console to share some of the same functionality as the previous consoles as to reduce the burden and cost for developers.

Mark Cerny worked with Sony and Naughty Dog to form the Initiative for a Common Engine Team, with part of the team working directly with Sony's hardware developers in Japan to bring about Yoshida's vision.

Mark Cerny spent much of his time in November 2007 researching the history of the x86 architecture, and then proposed a plan to Yoshida for him to take on the lead development role for the next PlayStation based on what he had learned so that the next console would be developer-friendly while using the x86 architecture.

Yoshida agreed, which helped to convince the upper management at Sony to allow Mark Cerny to remain a consultant while assigned as the PlayStation 4's lead designer.

Alongside hardware, Mark Cerny led development of one of the PlayStation 4's launch games, Knack, as well as its sequel.

Mark Cerny continued on as lead designer on Sony's future consoles, including the handheld PlayStation Vita, and for the PlayStation 5.

Mark Cerny said that his consultant status gives him freedom that being an employee of Sony would not have, such as being able to work with multiple different groups within Sony and its first-party studios for improving the PlayStation design.

Mark Cerny continued to consult in game design for several of Sony's first-party games, including The Last Guardian, Marvel's Spider-Man and Death Stranding.

Since around 2009 and the release of the PlayStation 4, Mark Cerny has worked on a two-year cycle where he visits most of Sony's first-party developers and other key studios to figure out what issues they have with the current hardware and what they would like to see out of future hardware.

Mark Cerny established the Method process in 2002 while consulting with Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and other Sony first-party studios.

Mark Cerny observed that there were completely different approaches needed in the preproduction stage and the production stage of video game development, and that it was impossible to put a timeline on the creative process.

Mark Cerny suggested that the pre-production stage should be freeform, allowing the creative persons to explore a game's viability prior to full development.

Once the decision is made to move forward on the game, then Mark Cerny recommends by the Method that the typical use of scheduled milestones and deliverables to keep the project on track.

Mark Cerny met his future wife in Japan, who helped him to establish Cerny Games, which she continues to manage to this day.

Mark Cerny is a diversely accomplished game designer, producer, programmer and technologist, fluent in Japanese and one of the foremost Western experts on the Japanese game market.

Mark Cerny is one of the only top-level independents in a business dominated by institutions.