Mark Cerny - Career

Career

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 the designer. For years he worked with Sega in Japan and the United States, where he worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 2. He was the vice president and then president of Universal Interactive Studios. He continues to work with Naughty Dog (where he has worked on Crash Bandicoot and later consulted on the Jak and Daxter series), Insomniac Games (Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank), and Sony.

From his extensive experience on the "dos and don'ts" in the game industry he has developed the "Cerny method", a strategy 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 does not excite customers, then the game idea should be set aside before too much effort is put into it.

The International Game Developers Association awarded Cerny with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards (IGDA) in 2004. IGNA 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 the "master collaborator". His success rests not only on the number of games he's worked on, but also on their quality and commercial success (having sold several dozen million units).

Cerny was an early employee of Kleiner Perkins-backed video game startup Crystal Dynamics in 1992, and was de facto head of engineering during production of its first two products, Crash 'n Burn (1993) and Total Eclipse (1994).