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WIRED: Mark Cerny - The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade SONY

Bundy

Banned
Exclusive: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

TOKYO — Shuhei Yoshida still remembers the call that convinced him Sony needed to change.

It was the late spring of 2006, and Yoshida was rushing to make his deadlines for the unveiling of Sony’s next big bet on the future of home video games, the PlayStation 3. He had worked on various PlayStations for more than a decade and was now one of the execs in charge of developing games for the new console. He was a software guy. But the call came from someone on the company’s hardware team, someone who helped build the PS3 itself.

When Yoshida picked up the phone, the caller told him that the console’s game controller, the DualShock 3, would include a motion sensor. That was news to Yoshida. And then the voice on the other end of the line told him to prepare a motion-sensing game for the unveiling, which would happen on stage at the annual E3 game and entertainment conference in Los Angeles.
“This was two or three weeks before the show,” remembers Yoshida, sitting inside his office at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters, a wall of PlayStation games stacked behind him. “I said: ‘What?!!’”

Yoshida and his team did produce a game for the keynote, frantically rejiggering a flight combat title they were developing called Warhawk. But, not too surprisingly, the demo was a complete mess — and a sign of things to come.
The PS3 launched with only 12 game titles, and most didn’t take full advantage of its Cell microprocessor, a complicated if high-powered component that, much like the controller, was designed without much input from anyone outside a small team of hardware engineers.

In the months to come, other developers were slow to embrace the PS3 as well, and this problem, coupled with the PS3′s hefty $600 price tag, made for a rocky start for the new machine. When the PS3 launched, according to most estimates, Sony controlled about 70 percent of the console market. Seven years later, it’s on even terms with Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the U.S. for 32 consecutive months.

But the PlayStation 4 is different.

With Yoshida giving his stamp of approval, Sony went so far as to hire a game maker — a software guy — to oversee the hardware design of its fourth generation console, due to reach stores in the US and Canada on November 15. The new PlayStation boss, Mark Cerny, is one of the world’s most storied game designers. In other words, he’s as software as you can get. In the early ’80s, at the age of 17, he went to work for Atari Games, making his name with the arcade classic Marble Madness, and he later made big waves in the console universe overseeing the development of PlayStation games such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.

He is, to say the least, an unconventional choice for the role. Cerny himself calls the arrangement “beyond unusual” and “crazy.” It’s not just that he’s a software guy running a hardware project. He’s an American who makes his home in Los Angeles, 5,500 miles from Sony’s Tokyo headquarters and the all-Japanese engineering team charged with putting the new console together. But Sony needed someone who could serve as a voice for the game makers and game players of the world. It needed someone who could bring a more egalitarian ethos to the development of the new PlayStation. It needed someone who could right the wrongs of the PS3. And Cerny offered all those things.

“When PlayStation 3 wrapped, we all started to do post-mortems. It was pretty brutal, frankly,” Cerny remembers, saying it was “very, very difficult” for software designers to build games for the console. “I just couldn’t stop thinking that maybe there was a different path. Maybe there was a hardware that could be made where it would be natural to make the games.”

In fashioning the PS4, he and his team pulled in opinions from across the world, tapping the expertise of the 14 game design studios owned by Sony and another 16 outside the company — something that would have never would have happened under the old PlayStation regime. The result is a much cheaper console that makes life as easy as possible for game makers. Its retail price is just under $400 — $100 less than the new Xbox One — and thanks to its relatively simple design, the console is launching alongside a slate of 22 new game titles, including a PS4 exclusive called Knack, directed by Cerny himself. Another eight to 10 titles are set to arrive before the end of the year.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PS4. WATCH OUR EXCLUSIVE TEARDOWN OF THE PLAYSTATION 4.

Cerny’s new role is just one indication that this is a new Sony, a Sony intent on opening up its development process and building its game gear in a way that better anticipates what the gaming world wants. It’s a change driven by necessity. Since the launch of the PS3 seven years ago, the gaming world has become a very different place. Consoles now have to compete with all sorts of other game platforms, including personal computers, smartphones, and tablets — not to mention the web. To be sure, Sony has to keep pace with its hardware, but all the high-fidelity graphical capability in the world won’t help if they can’t offer gamers games.

“Game partners are going to be as crucial as any of the particulars of the hardware,” says Scott Steinberg, a game industry consultant and pundit. “Cerny’s roots go back 30 or 40 years, and he understands what’s going on here. This isn’t just a technical play.”

Our Man In Tokyo
Mark Cerny first walked into Sony’s Tokyo headquarters in 1993. He grew up in Berkeley, California, not far from Silicon Valley, but in the late ’80s, after leaving Atari, he spent three and half years living in Japan, working at Sega on games such as Missile Defense 3-D and Shooting Gallery. During the time, he learned to speak, write, and read the language, and at a friend’s wedding, he even met the Japanese woman he would ultimately marry. By 1993, he had moved back to Northern California and joined another game outfit, Crystal Dynamics. But thanks to his Japanese connections, when he caught wind of the first PlayStation, then under development, he landed a meeting with Sony.
At the time, Sony was offering PlayStation software development kits — a set of tools for building new games — to a few select designers, but only in Japan. But Cerny talked his way into a kit for Crystal Dynamics, in part because he could read and sign the Japanese contract. The Sony exec who handed him the contract, after meeting him for the first time that day, was Shu Yoshida. “Crystal Dynamics became the first non-Japanese development group to work on the PlayStation,” Yoshida says. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Cerny and the Japanese electronics giant. He went on to build games not only for the original PlayStation but also its successor, the PlayStation 2. On the PlayStation 3, he was “embedded” with the hardware team as it build the console, to get a feel for the new hardware — though he didn’t have a say in particulars of the design.

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Mr Swine

Banned
So does that mean that Sony now is an American company like MS? awesome!

just joking, awesome that he changed Sony with the PS4!
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Them pics of Cerny, House, and Yoshida are cool. These guys look passionate about their job and the PS4 shows this.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
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Poor PSMove. Relegated to the bottom shelf alongside the 360.

Seems they were really proud of that Edge cover too ;)
 

VOOK

We don't know why he keeps buying PAL, either.
All I see in that picture of Cerny is Ocarina of Time (N64), Wii U, Wii and GameCube games. I can make out No More Heroes and Zombi U.
 
Three weeks to implement motion control into a game for an E3 presentation. 2006 Sony was a joke.

The biggest problem with Sony back then was that they didn't have a clear vision for the console. Everything they did was a reaction to what others were doing. And that was on top of them making really ridiculous comments about the console.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
The thing is, people who keep parroting the 'RETURN OF THE KING' thing are completely wrong. The PS4 has the potential to absolutely outstrip the PS2 as a platform. PS2 succeeded and flourished in spite of its shortcomings, not because it was a particularly great piece of hardware. For the first time ever, Sony have put ease of development at the centre of their hardware, not abstract measures of theoretical performance throughput that most developers have absolutely no interest in. Cerny even says himself when asked, the thing he is most happy about with respect to PS4 is not the power but the ease of development.

This was Ken Kutaragi's problem: he was more interested in engineering solutions than he was in software development.

PS4 enables developers to do what they want, and not be dictated to by the shortcomings of the hardware and failures of engineers. And it lets them do it cheaply, meaning that they have the freedom to make riskier games. And because they haven't spent $Texas on over-engineering the console, they are able to sell it more cheaply, so they will storm ahead of the competition in the marketplace too.

I think we will look back at the PS4 as the best console ever built when all is said and done.
 

JohngPR

Member
In the late ’90s, Mark Cerny gave a speech outlining the way he develops and nurtures new games, and this simple philosophy now pervades the industry. “It has been picked up pretty much by everyone in the business,” says Ben Cousins, a game maker at EA who has also worked inside Sony. “It’s been a huge influence, and not many people outside the industry really appreciate that.”
They call it The Method, or The Cerny Method, or just Method. You start by building only part of a game. You build just enough to give players a feel for what it will be. “It’s not that revolutionary,” Cerny says. “We don’t know if a game is something someone is going to be interested in or not. It makes a lot of sense to just a build a piece of it first — but that piece needs to be representative. You can’t just hack something together.” He calls this prototype a “publishable first playable,” and once it’s in place, he seeks feedback from players, using their input to tweak the game and expand it into a completed title.

So this article is pretty much crediting Cerny with inventing the vertical slice? News to me.
 
"Cerny was entirely out of the loop of the aesthetic conversation, and didn’t see the completed PS4 design — a sleek, slightly off-kilter box that’s both simple and different — until the rest of the world saw it during an unveiling this past February. But his breed of collaborative development pervaded the rest of the console’s evolution, extending all the way to its game controller, the DualShock 4."

Incorrect. Cerny (and rest of the world) didn't see the console until E3, not February 20.
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
recounts a moment at the E3 gaming conference in the ’90s when Cerny was nearly reduced to tears by a 45-minute tirade from Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation, who didn’t see much future in Crash Bandicoot. “Ken is a very intense person,” Cerny says.

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Cerny was joining a company run by people intent on broadening its way of doing things. He fit in because he knew Japanese culture — and Sony culture in particular.
So he is an expert on Japanese culture...
 
The biggest problem with Sony back then was that they didn't have a clear vision for the console. Everything they did was a reaction to what others were doing. And that was on top of them making really ridiculous comments about the console.

That sounds really familiar, and yet I can't quite put my finger on why...
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
The biggest problem with Sony back then was that they didn't have a clear vision for the console. Everything they did was a reaction to what others were doing. And that was on top of them making really ridiculous comments about the console.

The biggest problem with Sony back then was Ken Kutaragi.
 

AmyS

Member
I hope Cerny is taking a well-deserved break before he gets started on an Ultra HD capable PlayStation 5.
 
So this article is pretty much crediting Cerny with inventing the vertical slice? News to me.

I thought in the development community the Vertical Slice is pretty much abhorred? It certainly doesn't seem like the most efficient way to build software. It's probably great for demoing your game or convincing investors/boards/bosses to sign off on it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has any other advantages.
 

tuffy

Member
The result is a much cheaper console that makes life as easy as possible for game makers. Its retail price is just under $400 — $100 less than the new Xbox One — and thanks to its relatively simple design, the console is launching alongside a slate of 22 new game titles, including a PS4 exclusive called Knack, directed by Cerny himself. Another eight to 10 titles are set to arrive before the end of the year.
Being a much cheaper console that's very easy to develop for is much of the reason the original Playstation was so successful in the first place. So it's amusing the company had to learn that lesson all over again.
 
I thought in the development community the Vertical Slice is pretty much abhorred? It certainly doesn't seem like the most efficient way to build software. It's probably great for demoing your game or convincing investors/boards/bosses to sign off on it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has any other advantages.

Whut.

Watch_Dogs reveal? Vertical slice. Bioshock Infinite 1st Demo? Vertical slice.

A significant amount of gameplay reveals made 2-3 years before the game's released are all vertical slices.

Vertical slice helps to get an actual sense check of whether or not your game concept is actually feasible, or enjoyable in a close-to-final form. It's especially helpful if your game has a some level of gimmick that impacts gameplay.
 
That was news to Yoshida. And then the voice on the other end of the line told him to prepare a motion-sensing game for the unveiling, which would happen on stage at the annual E3 game and entertainment conference in Los Angeles.
“This was two or three weeks before the show,” remembers Yoshida, sitting inside his office at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters, a wall of PlayStation games stacked behind him. “I said: ‘What?!!’”
That must've been a fun day.
 
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