The company needed someone who spoke Japanese, understood hardware, and knew the industry — and Cerny turned out to be exactly that person.
On a recent episode of the My Perfect Console podcast, host Simon Parkin conducted an extensive interview with Mark Cerny — the lead architect behind the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Cerny disclosed details about the development of the PS4 and explained why it became one of Sony’s most successful consoles.
After the rocky launch of the PlayStation 3, whose architecture proved highly unfriendly to developers, Sony found itself in a difficult spot. Many multiplatform games ran better on the Xbox 360, and external studios complained about how hard it was to port titles. Internal teams like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio eventually squeezed impressive results from the PS3, but that didn’t fully restore the platform’s standing.
It was at that moment that Mark Cerny — who had initially come to Japan simply to study the PS3’s hardware and assist Sony’s US-based teams — was unexpectedly asked to become the lead architect for the next console.
They needed someone who spoke Japanese, understood games, knew software, and grasped hardware. When I sketched a Venn diagram of those four circles, I was the only person in the center.
Unlike prior PlayStation consoles, which were developed under tight secrecy, Cerny took a different route: he personally consulted with more than 150 developers across numerous studios to ask what they genuinely wanted from the next system.
Hardware used to be developed in secret — there was concern that revealing the next system would deter purchases of the current one. I chose to take a different approach.
When the host asked Cerny whether anyone in Sony’s leadership had questioned his unusually open strategy, he smiled and said he’d be happy to share some of those stories about his time at the company after he retires.
Source: iXBT.games