Mark Evan Cerny ( ; born August 24, 1964) is an American video game designer, programmer, 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). 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.
Career
1982–1996: First years
Mark Evan Cerny was born in 1964 or 1965. He grew up in San Francisco, and was a fan of computer programming and arcade games as a youth. He started working in Atari's arcade division on January 18, 1982. In those earlier days of professional game development, teams were small and each member was responsible for a wider range of roles than today. He first worked with Ed Logg on Millipede and Owen Rubin on Major Havoc. "Working at Atari early in my career was an experience I'll never forget. I got to work alongside game design legends like Ed Logg, Dave Theurer, Owen Rubin, among many others, during a time when creativity, passion and competition was at a high. Ideas that were 100% original was not only expected, but demanded. As a young 18-year-old, I couldn't ask for a better introduction for my career," said Cerny.
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.
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 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". Cerny opted to leave Universal to become consultant under his own company, Cerny Games, that would allow him to keep working with Naughty Dog, Insomniac and Sony. Cerny's Method has since become a standard practice in the video game development industry.
Cerny continued on as lead designer on Sony's future consoles, including the handheld PlayStation Vita, and for the PlayStation 5. 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.
The Method process
Cerny established the Method process in 2002 while consulting with Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and other Sony first-party studios. 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. He suggested that the pre-production stage should be freeform, allowing the creative persons to explore a game's viability prior to full development. The end product of the preproduction stage under the Method process should be a "publishable first playable" version of the game that can be used to determine the viability of the title. IGDA stated, "It's rare to find a 'jack-of-all-trades' who not only has the high-level vision for great game design but can act as the glue to adhere all the pieces together. His unusual but highly effective methodology has brought us some of the most entertaining games in history." He was described as "a master collaborator". His Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon games have collectively sold more than 30 million units.
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."
Works
thumb|upright|Cerny presenting a lifetime achievement award to [[Amy Hennig at the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards]]
{| class="wikitable sortable" style="border:none; margin:0;"
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Game title
! scope="col" | Role(s)
! class="unsortable" scope="col" |
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1984
| Major Havoc
|Programmer, designer
| style="text-align:center;" |
|-
| Marble Madness
|Programmer, designer
| style="text-align:center;" |
|-
| 1989
| California Games
|Programmer
| style="text-align:center;" |