Mark Cerny
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Mark Cerny (born 1964) is a video game industry figure having worked as a 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.
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.
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). Both games were respected as technical achievements on the 3DO game platform,[citation needed] but were not commercial or critical successes. Both games missed their Christmas 1993 ship dates, and Cerny resigned from Crystal Dynamics several weeks later.
From his extensive experience on the "do's 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 on March 24, 2004, calling him 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).
