Mark Cerny
| Mark Cerny | |
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Cerny in 2010
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| Born | August 24, 1964 |
| Residence | Burbank, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Game designer |
| Spouse(s) | Katsura Cerny |
| Awards | AIAS Hall of Fame Award (2010) |
Mark Cerny (born August 24, 1964) is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and business executive. As president of Cerny Games, which he founded in 1998, he now 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 later 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.
Cerny, a fan of computer programming and arcade games, started in the game industry at the age of 17 when he joined Atari in 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.
Cerny's first major success is usually cited as Marble Madness in which he, at age 18, acted as designer and co-programmer. For years he worked with Sega in Japan and the United States, where he worked on various Master System and Genesis releases, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog 2. He was the vice president and then president of Universal Interactive Studios.
He has worked extensively with Naughty Dog (on the Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter series and the first Uncharted game), Insomniac Games (on the Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank and Resistance series), and Sony. From his extensive experience on the "dos and don'ts" in the game industry he has developed a teaching "method" for game development. His method prefers a free-form, pre-production stage that explores a game's viability prior to full development. For example, he advocates that if the first level produced doesn't excite customers, then the game idea should be set aside before too much effort is put into it.
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