Mark Cerny

Mark Evan Cerny born August 24, 1964 is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and entertainment executive.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cerny attended UC Berkeley before dropping out to pursue the career in video games. In his early years, he spent time at Atari, Sega, Crystal Dynamics & Universal Interactive Studios before becoming an self-employed grown-up consultant under his own agency Cerny Games in 1998. While at Sega, he establishment Sega Technical Institute, workings on games including Sonic the Hedgehog 2 1992.

Cerny has since frequently collaborated with Sony Interactive Entertainment as a consultant, including being the lead designer for hardware of several PlayStation consoles, and has consulted with Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games since their build in the 1990s, as alive as other Sony first-party studios such as Sucker Punch Productions. He has also developed several games, notably the arcade game Marble Madness and the Knack series, and credited on numerous 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.

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 study a game's viability prior to full development. The end product of the preproduction stage under the Method process should be a "publishable number one playable" representation of the game that can be used to determine the viability of the title. This explanation does non need to be content-complete but manage enough to be used in playtesting from potential consumers. whether the game at this state does non excite players, then the game notion should be kind aside before too much try is put into it. one time the decision is submitted to fall out forward on the game, then Cerny recommends by the Method that the typical ownership of scheduled milestones and deliverables to keep the project on track.