Mark Cerny, the lead systems architect of the PlayStation 4 | 
Ariel Zambelich
TOKYO – Shuhei Yoshida still remembers the call that convinced him Sony needed to change.
It was the late spring of 2006, and Yoshida was rushing to make his deadlines for the unveiling of Sony's next big bet on the future of home video games, the PlayStation 3. He had worked on various PlayStations for more than a decade and was now one of the execs in charge of developing games for the new console. He was a software guy. But the call came from someone on the company’s hardware team, someone who helped build the PS3 itself.
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When Yoshida picked up the phone, the caller told him that the console's game controller, the DualShock 3, would include a motion sensor. That was news to Yoshida. And then the voice on the other end of the line told him to prepare a motion-sensing game for the unveiling, which would happen on stage at the annual E3 game and entertainment conference in Los Angeles. "This was two or three weeks before the show," remembers Yoshida, sitting inside his office at Sony's Tokyo headquarters, a wall of PlayStation games stacked behind him. "I said: 'What?!!'"
Yoshida and his team did produce a game for the keynote, frantically rejiggering a flight combat title they were developing called Warhawk. But, not too surprisingly, the demo was a complete mess – and a sign of things to come. The PS3 launched with only 12 game titles, and most didn't take full advantage of its Cell microprocessor, a complicated if high-powered component that, much like the controller, was designed without much input from anyone outside a small team of hardware engineers.
In the months to come, other developers were slow to embrace the PS3 as well, and this problem, coupled with the PS3's hefty $600 price tag, made for a rocky start for the new machine. When the PS3 launched, according to most estimates, Sony controlled about 70 percent of the console market. Seven years later, it's on even terms with Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the U.S. for 32 consecutive months.
But the PlayStation 4 is different.
With Yoshida giving his stamp of approval, Sony went so far as to hire a game maker – a software guy – to oversee the hardware design of its fourth generation console, due to reach stores in the US and Canada on November 15. The new PlayStation boss, Mark Cerny, is one of the world's most storied game designers. In other words, he's as software as you can get. In the early '80s, at the age of 17, he went to work for Atari Games, making his name with the arcade classic Marble Madness, and he later made big waves in the console universe overseeing the development of PlayStation games such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.
Sony senior vice president Masayasu Ito places the PS4 on a stand for a portrait with other members of the PS4 engineering team | Ariel Zambelich
He is, to say the least, an unconventional choice for the role. Cerny himself calls the arrangement "beyond unusual" and "crazy." It's not just that he's a software guy running a hardware project. He's an American who makes his home in Los Angeles, 5,500 miles from Sony's Tokyo headquarters and the all-Japanese engineering team charged with putting the new console together. But Sony needed someone who could serve as a voice for the game makers and game players of the world. It needed someone who could bring a more egalitarian ethos to the development of the new PlayStation. It needed someone who could right the wrongs of the PS3. And Cerny offered all those things.
"When PlayStation 3 wrapped, we all started to do post-mortems. It was pretty brutal, frankly," Cerny remembers, saying it was "very, very difficult" for software designers to build games for the console. "I just couldn't stop thinking that maybe there was a different path. Maybe there was a hardware that could be made where it would be natural to make the games."
In fashioning the PS4, he and his team pulled in opinions from across the world, tapping the expertise of the 16 game design studios owned by Sony and another 16 outside the company – something that would have never would have happened under the old PlayStation regime.1 The result is a much cheaper console that makes life as easy as possible for game makers. Its retail price is just under $400 – $100 less than the new Xbox One – and thanks to its relatively simple design, the console is launching alongside a slate of 22 new game titles, including a PS4 exclusive called Knack, directed by Cerny himself. Another eight to 10 titles are set to arrive before the end of the year.
Cerny's new role is just one indication that this is a new Sony, a Sony intent on opening up its development process and building its game gear in a way that better anticipates what the gaming world wants. It's a change driven by necessity. Since the launch of the PS3 seven years ago, the gaming world has become a very different place. Consoles now have to compete with all sorts of other game platforms, including personal computers, smartphones, and tablets – not to mention the web. To be sure, Sony has to keep pace with its hardware, but all the high-fidelity graphical capability in the world won't help if they can't offer gamers games.
"Game partners are going to be as crucial as any of the particulars of the hardware," says Scott Steinberg, a game industry consultant and pundit. "Cerny's roots go back 30 or 40 years, and he understands what's going on here. This isn't just a technical play."
Our Man In Tokyo
Mark Cerny first walked into Sony's Tokyo headquarters in 1993. He grew up in Berkeley, California, not far from Silicon Valley, but in the late '80s, after leaving Atari, he spent three and half years living in Japan, working at Sega on games such as Missile Defense 3-D and Shooting Gallery. During the time, he learned to speak, write, and read the language, and at a friend's wedding, he even met the Japanese woman he would ultimately marry. By 1993, he had moved back to Northern California and joined another game outfit, Crystal Dynamics. But thanks to his Japanese connections, when he caught wind of the first PlayStation, then under development, he landed a meeting with Sony.
At the time, Sony was offering PlayStation software development kits – a set of tools for building new games – to a few select designers, but only in Japan. But Cerny talked his way into a kit for Crystal Dynamics, in part because he could read and sign the Japanese contract. The Sony exec who handed him the contract, after meeting him for the first time that day, was Shu Yoshida. "Crystal Dynamics became the first non-Japanese development group to work on the PlayStation," Yoshida says. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Cerny and the Japanese electronics giant. He went on to build games not only for the original PlayStation but also its successor, the PlayStation 2. On the PlayStation 3, he was "embedded" with the hardware team as it build the console, to get a feel for the new hardware – though he didn't have a say in particulars of the design.
Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios | Ariel Zambelich
Over those years, Cerny grew close to the company, but it wasn't always smooth going. The book All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How 50 Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture recounts a moment at the E3 gaming conference in the '90s when Cerny was nearly reduced to tears by a 45-minute tirade from Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation, who didn't see much future in Crash Bandicoot. "Ken is a very intense person," Cerny says.
In the end, Crash was the top selling franchise for the inaugural PlayStation, and after the launch of the PS3, when Kutaragi gave way to Kazuo Hirai as the head of Sony Computer Entertainment, the subsidiary that oversees the PlayStation, Cerny took his shot. In 2007, after winning the approval of Yoshida, who was still in charge of game development for the PlayStation, he put himself forward as the lead architect of the PS4.
It wasn't the first time Sony had promoted a Westerner to a top position – itself unusual for a major Japanese corporation. Howard Stringer, the former Sony CEO, was born in Wales, as was Andrew House, who succeed Hirai as the head of Sony Computer Entertainment in 2011. What's more, both Yoshida and Hirai spent years working for Sony in the States, soaking up American culture. When Western colleagues like House and Cerny discuss the two Japanese execs, they don't use the Japanese honorific "-san." They use their first names.
Cerny was joining a company run by people intent on broadening its way of doing things. He fit in because he knew Japanese culture – and Sony culture in particular. He has nearly as long a history with Hirai, now the CEO of Sony, as he does with Yoshida. "It's surreal to think that I know the head of Sony Corp from when we used to go drink too much after trade shows in 1998," he says. But his tenure wasn't all about fitting in. He was also there to take the company beyond its traditions.
The Method
In the late '90s, Mark Cerny gave a speech outlining the way he develops and nurtures new games, and this simple philosophy now pervades the industry. "It has been picked up pretty much by everyone in the business," says Ben Cousins, a game maker at DeNA who has also worked inside Sony. "It's been a huge influence, and not many people outside the industry really appreciate that."
They call it The Method, or The Cerny Method, or just Method. You start by building only part of a game. You build just enough to give players a feel for what it will be. "It's not that revolutionary," Cerny says. "We don't know if a game is something someone is going to be interested in or not. It makes a lot of sense to just a build a piece of it first – but that piece needs to be representative. You can't just hack something together." He calls this prototype a "publishable first playable," and once it's in place, he seeks feedback from players, using their input to tweak the game and expand it into a completed title.
Cerny first started this playtesting in the mid-'90s. In the beginning, it was an ad hoc process. He remembers pulling gamers off the street and bringing them into a room filled with game consoles. He and his fellow designers used VCRs to record the games, and they hastily put cardboard dividers between game players, so they wouldn't distract each other. But eventually, the process evolved to the point where Cerny and other designers and execs would watch players in a specially designed room, from the other side of a two-way mirror.
Andrew House, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. | Ariel Zambelich
Andrew House, then a marketing bigwig with Sony, remembers Cerny watching players from the mirror. "It was such an eye-opener for me," says House. "He doesn't talk to the player at all. He just watches what they do and how they play the game. I remember him, quite literally, phoning game designers changes on the fly, back to the team in LA, just based on what he was seeing."
As the PlayStation 4 lead architect, commuting back and forth to Tokyo, Cerny brought much the same ethos to the creation of the console itself. Another Sony subsidiary, Sony Worldwide Studios, oversees an eclectic mix of semi-independent game development houses, and along the way, Cerny and the rest of the hardware brain trust consulted many of these developers on how the hardware should take shape.
"The thought was that we would start with a more open process, a more collaborative look at what worked and what didn't," Cerny says. "I did something that would have been unthinkable in 2004: I went to about 30 game teams about what they would like to see in the next-generation hardware."
Horsepower Without Hassle
Everyone agreed they should abandon the Cell microprocessor, a byzantine arrangement in which a central core chip delegated processing tasks to one of eight other "synergistic processing elements." Instead, the PlayStation 4 uses an "x86" chip, a processor much like those that have driven most of our personal computers for the past three decades. Its more streamlined architecture makes life significantly easier for game developers, but its high-end processing core gives titles an added speed kick you won't find on the average PC. Designed in tandem with chip giant AMD, the PS4's central processor blends a CPU, the traditional brain of a computer, with a GPU, which handles graphics, juggling these two tasks with far greater efficiency than we've seen in the past.
Sony's game makers were also adamant that the console include a memory subsystem that could serve not only the most ambitious 3-D games of today but those that will evolve years down the road. Thus, the PS4 includes 8 GB of what's known as GDDR5 RAM, a technology that's significantly faster than what you see in everyday PCs, and this massive memory pool is shared by both CPU and GPU. "Short term, we can expect some very good games," Cerny says. "Long term, we can look forward to the growth in games. There's a lot of untapped depth in the hardware."
According to Yusuke Watanabe, a senior producer on Knack, Cerny's new approach to console design has paid off handsomely. "Creating games on the PS4 is much faster," Watanabe says, speaking through an interpreter inside the Sony Worldwide Studios building where Knack was built, just a few blocks from Sony HQ. "So, we can create something and try it out, and if it's not good, we can recreate it faster, compared to the PS3." In other words, it plays right into The Cerny Method. Cerny estimates the relatively simple architecture of the PS4 saved the Knack team about a year of development time.
Tetsu Sumii, who oversaw the look and feel of the PS4 | Ariel Zambelich
Yes, today's high-end gaming PCs can match the raw hardware of the PS4, thanks in large part to their enormous graphics processors. But, with exclusive launch titles such as Knack and Killzone: Shadow Fall and Resogun, Sony will offer at least a few games you won't find anywhere else, and it has given developers the hardware – and enough runway – to reach heights that can attract even the most dedicated of gamers.
Knack is a cartoonish action title in the vein of Crash Bandicoot, but it takes the genre to a new level. As engineers demonstrate the game at the Worldwide Studios office, the title character at the heart of the game is an automaton made up of thousands of individual particles, each able to float and move on its own. Along the way, as he's menaced by other characters, he may lose bits and pieces of himself, here and there, and just as quickly, he can rebuild himself, all those pieces coming back to together in a whirl of a physics simulation. But you also see the difference in the world he inhabits, where every character you meet is rendered in unique detail.
Whatever you can get out of your monster PC gaming rig, you can't get Knack – and that's what Sony is banking on.
The American Irony
Sony's new collaborative attitude has its limits. The look and feel of the PlayStation 4 is solely the work of the Corporate Design Center, lead by Tetsu Sumii. With some things, you just can't start asking everyone for their opinion. "If we start such a thing, it never ends," Sumii says. "It would be a nightmare."
The most you can say is that Sumii received a little input from House, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, and some of the core PS4 team. They rejected his initial designs as too much like an ordinary box, and House told Sumii to return with something else. In the end, the designer produced six completed designs, and House had two of the six mocked up as physical boxes, keeping the pair in his office for several days before eventually making his decision.
Cerny was entirely out of the loop of the aesthetic conversation, and didn't see the completed PS4 design – a sleek, slightly off-kilter box that's both simple and different – until the rest of the world saw it during an unveiling this past June.2 But his breed of collaborative development pervaded the rest of the console's evolution, extending all the way to its game controller, the DualShock 4.
Takeshi Igarashi (left) and Toshimasa Aoki, who helped oversee the design of the DualShock 4 controller | Ariel Zambelich
The controller team, led by Toshimasa Aoki, Takeshi Igarashi, and others, sought opinions from developers both inside Sony and outside the company, making a particular point of discussing the size of the controller with Sony game developers in Holland, who have much larger hands than the average Japanese engineer. "With the PS3, we were in Ken Kutaragi's world. Whatever he wanted went into the controller. He would say: 'This is the future,'" explains Aoki. "But now, since Ken's not here, it's more of a team sport."
Aoki and his team considered myriad designs, including a controller you could hold with only one hand, joysticks that operated in three dimensions, a device that tracked your pulse, and controllers with built-in microphones and cameras. But in the end, they settled on something that looks and feels a lot like the DualShock 3—because that's what game makers wanted.
That said, the game makers did back the addition of a small touch pad to the DualShock 4, a nod to the popularity of games on smartphones and tablets, and it was actually a software developer who suggested the controller include a "share" button that would let gamers instantly capture videos of their game play and send them off to friends and other game players. This developer floated the idea during a sweeping conference call with Aoki and other hardware designers, and the response was immediate.
"Everyone was like: 'That's it. Let's do that,'" Aoki remembers. And they did. It couldn't have been more different from Yoshida's experience with the DualShock 3 seven years earlier.
The irony here is although Sony hired an American to oversee its new console, and although it put even more trust in Japanese execs who have spent so much time in the States, the PlayStation was built in a way that's more Japanese – at least in the traditional sense. Yoshida says that in American corporate culture, the orders come from the top of the hierarchy and move down, whereas Japan is a place where a corporation is more of a collective, where anyone can contribute a good idea, where all the individual pieces work more as a whole. Before Mark Cerny, the PlayStation team didn't necessarily work in what Yoshida describes as a Japanese way – the orders came from the top, and people followed them – but now it does.
The upshot is that the PS4 will arrive alongside what Cerny calls the strongest launch lineup in PlayStation history – not only in terms of the number of titles but also the quality of those titles. After the somewhat rough road traveled by the PlayStation 3, the rise of the Microsoft Xbox 360, and the onslaught of games on mobile devices and the web, this is what Sony was hoping for. With the PS4, the Japanese giant is poised to reclaim its spot atop the world of game hardware, thanks to a little help from an American software designer.
Sony HQ in Tokyo | Ariel Zambelich
1Correction 11:45 EST 11/07/13: An earlier version of this story said the Sony has 14 internal game design studios. It has 16.
2Correction 11:45 EST 11/07/13: An earlier version of this story said that Mark Cerny first saw the exterior PS4 design in February. He saw it in June.
