Image: Damien McFerran / Push Square
One of the biggest stories of the PS4 is how Mark Cerny designed a developer-first console which returned Sony to its position as market leader.
While the PS3 eventually sold well, it endured a particularly tough time, owing to its complicated architecture which made making games for it a challenge.
First-party developers like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio would eventually extract maximum value from the machine, but third-parties would struggle, with most games running better on the Xbox 360.
Cerny, at the time, was tasked by Sony Computer Entertainment America to go to Japan and learn as much about the PS3 hardware as he possibly could. His mission was to then share this knowledge with the US-based first-party teams.
But in an interview with Simon Parkin on his My Perfect Console podcast, Cerny reveals that he almost ended up joining the hardware team, as it was a “troubled project” and needed all the help and support it could get.
After the departure of Ken Kutaragi, the company started searching for someone who could design future hardware, and what would eventually become the PS4.
Cerny remembers how he effectively pitched himself for the job:
“The person needs to speak Japanese, understand games, understand software, and understand hardware. And when you make the Venn diagram for all of that, it just looked like me where all those circles intersected. So, I went to a couple of people, including Shu [Yoshida], in the Sony organisation, and I said, what if, y’know, what if I am the architect of the next console? And amazingly, the answer from [PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai at the time] was yes.”
In order to design the console, Cerny decided on a different approach: he spoke to more than 150 developers to try to understand what they wanted.
He notes that past consoles had always been designed in secret in order to prevent leaks, as hardware companies worried customers would stop purchasing their current products if information about their replacements got out.
Asked if there was any resistance to his approach from the Sony hierarchy, he hints “there are some great stories that I can’t tell until I’m safely into retirement”.
But the tactic was a success, and the PS4 went on to dominant its closest competitor, the Xbox One.
So, what was the secret? “It’s not the sexy stuff,” according to Cerny.
“It’s things like debuggers, right? Performance analysers, compilers. But the details of the toolchain are what’s enabling the modern programmer to have higher productivity than I had in 1982, sitting at my desk at Atari. I’m sorry that isn’t the story about how incredibly smart we were or that breakthrough we had, but I think it’s an important change in sort of the culture of how we approached our work.”
The interview is a great listen, and you really do get a sense of how Cerny’s background enabled him to be one of the most important voices at PlayStation.
He talks about his history making games for both Atari and SEGA, and how this helped inform the decisions he would later make with the PS4.
Obviously, Sony replicated the blueprint for the PS5, and we know Cerny is now very hard at work on the PS6 in collaboration with AMD, which will almost certainly adopt a lot of the same philosophies he pioneered with the PS4.
[source shows.acast.com]
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As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to them, and is a bit of a gacha whale.