Product Code Database
Mark Evan Cerny ( ; born August 24, 1964) is an American video game designer, game programmer, game producer and media proprietor.
Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cerny attended UC Berkeley before dropping out to pursue a career in video games. In his early years, he spent time at Atari, Sega, Crystal Dynamics and Universal Interactive Studios before becoming an independent consultant under his own company Cerny Games in 1998. While at Sega, he established Sega Technical Institute, working on games including Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992).
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. He has also 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. He has also developed several games, notably the arcade game Marble Madness and the Knack series, and has been credited on many more for his consulting work.
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.
Cerny's first major success was the arcade game Marble Madness in which he, at age 18, acted as designer and co-programmer. During this period around 1985, he gained an interest in video game hardware, which Cerny considered far simpler than his later work with the PlayStation. By the end of the 1980s, he joined Sega, initially working at Sega's headquarters in Japan and then returning to the United States by 1991 to help establish the Sega Technical Institute. There, he worked on various Master System and Sega Genesis releases, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join the newly formed Crystal Dynamics. He initially worked 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 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. While the development kit had been delivered to Crystal Dynamics by 1994, Cerny had left the studio to lead Universal Pictures' newly formed multimedia division.
Around 1999, Sony was developing the hardware for the PlayStation 2. Yoshida, now executive producer of product development, contacted Cerny about helping to develop a graphics engine for the new console. Cerny accepted, and worked in Japan over a three-month span, being the first American to work on the PlayStation 2. Once the engine was complete, Cerny helped both Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their first PlayStation 2 titles, and Ratchet & Clank, respectively, as well as several sequels in both series that followed. During this period, Cerny developed his "Method" approach for game development from his experience on the "dos and don'ts" in the game industry. Cerny's Method has since become a standard practice in the video game development industry.
Cerny would continue his consulting with Sony. In 2003, Yoshida had been promoted to vice president of product development at Sony Computer Entertainment America, where the planning of Sony's next console the PlayStation 3 had started. Yoshida again brought 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. Cerny worked with Sony and Naughty Dog to form the Initiative for a Common Engine (ICE) Team, with part of the team working directly with Sony's hardware developers in Japan to bring about Yoshida's vision. Ultimately the PlayStation 3's new core hardware, the Cell, was difficult to work with, though some of the goals of the ICE Team were implemented. In addition to hardware support, Cerny continued to assist Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their first PlayStation 3 titles, from Naughty Dog, and for Insomniac, as well as for other Sony first-party titles, including God of War III and Killzone 3.
Cerny continued on as lead designer on Sony's future consoles, including the handheld PlayStation Vita, and for the PlayStation 5. Exclusive: What to Expect From Sony's Next-Gen PlayStation - Wired.com, Retrieved April 17, 2019 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. He also 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, 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. These visits may lead to mid-generation improvements in hardware revisions or improved software, or have been used to inform the direction of the next generation of hardware.
In 2010, at the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Mark Cerny was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. "Mark Cerny is the closest we have come to a modern-day Da Vinci," said Joseph Olin, then-president of the AIAS. "What he does isn't restricted to a single aspect of game creation, he really is a Renaissance man. He 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. He is also one of the only top-level independents in a business dominated by institutions."
| 1983 | Major Havoc | Programmer, designer | |
| 1984 | Marble Madness | Programmer, designer | |
| 1987 | Shooting Gallery | Programmer, designer | |
| Missile Defense 3-D | Programmer, designer | ||
| 1988 | Shanghai | Programmer | |
| 1989 | California Games | Programmer | |
| 1990 | Dick Tracy | Programmer, designer | |
| 1992 | Kid Chameleon | Programmer, designer | |
| 1992 | Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | Producer | |
| 1993 | Crash 'n Burn | Programmer, designer | |
| 1994 | Total Eclipse | Programmer, designer | |
| 1995 | The Ooze | Programmer | |
| 1996 | Crash Bandicoot | Executive producer | |
| Disruptor | Executive producer, designer | ||
| 1997 | Producer, designer | ||
| 1998 | Spyro the Dragon | Executive producer | |
| Running Wild | Executive producer | ||
| Producer, designer | |||
| 1999 | Executive producer | ||
| 2000 | Crash Bash | Producer, designer | |
| Design consultant | |||
| 2001 | Programmer | ||
| 2002 | Ratchet & Clank | Designer | |
| 2003 | Jak II | Programmer, designer | |
| Designer | |||
| 2004 | Design consultant | ||
| 2006 | Design consultant | ||
| 2007 | Design consultant | ||
| Design consultant | |||
| 2008 | Resistance 2 | Designer | |
| 2010 | God of War III | Design consultant | |
| 2011 | Killzone 3 | Design consultant | |
| 2013 | Knack | Director | |
| 2016 | Ratchet & Clank | Design consultant | |
| The Last Guardian | Executive producer | ||
| 2017 | Knack 2 | Director | |
| 2018 | Marvel's Spider-Man | Executive producer | |
| 2019 | Death Stranding | Technical producer | |
| 2020 | Executive producer | ||
| 2021 | Executive producer |
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