Mark Cerny: When making consoles, we're not trying to build low-cost PCs

gamesindustry.biz:

Mark Cerny has just added something to his growing list of achievements.

I'm not talking about the global success of last year's Spider-Man 2, on which Cerny worked as executive producer. But something, in many ways, just as impressive.

"I just finished playing Animal Well, and before that and I was very heavily into Neon White, which is my first speedrun," he says.

"I actually platinumed that. That was a real challenge. I wasn't sure if I could do it, because reflexes as I head towards 60 are very different from the reflexes I had when I was a teenager and playing in the arcades. But I am glad I went after it. The precision and stamina that you need to get through a game like that is different in the way it feels, compared with these character action games like Spider-Man that I've been working on."

Cerny is explaining to us that despite his current role as the architect behind PlayStation hardware, what he finds interesting about a game isn't necessarily what it's doing technically, but rather what's new about it. In fact, for all the different roles that Cerny has had in his 42-year games industry career, the one he's never stopped doing is that of 'gamer'.

"I continue to be a massive player," he tells us. "I got into this 40-something years ago because I was an arcade addict.

"Back in the day, I was one of the best players in the country at Defender. That's actually how I got my job at Atari. There was a reporter who was writing a book on arcade games strategies. We're talking about an era so distant that there weren't even games magazines. So if you wanted to learn arcade game strategy, you would go to the supermarket and at the checkout there would be a book that you could buy that would tell you how to play whatever game. And he interviewed me for Defender because I was a well-known local player. I bumped into him later, I told him I wanted to get into the business, and he very kindly called Atari Coin-Op and got me an interview, and the rest is history."

Cerny's