An Interview with Mark Cerny

Someone jokingly described him as "the David Beckham" of video games, given his talent in the video game industry is recognised worldwide. After his excellent Gamelab lecture discussing the build up to the global launch of PS4, some people start calling Mark Cerny "the Steve Jobs of Sony".

In Barcelona to pick up the Legend award for his amazing career (and joining the likes of Peter Molyneux and Hironobu Sakaguchi), Gamereactor Spain managed to speak with the creator, and he - obviously - had a lot to say.

You can watch the entire GRTV interview at the end of the article, but here's a few choice snippets from our talk.

The Five Year Building Process

"Pretty continuously throughout those five years [of development] we've been soliciting the feedback from the great game creators; first about what they want to see in the console, and then as we started creating it, what the reaction was to what we were putting in the console."

Building better PlayStations

"For PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 it has been very much the creation of the hardware team; they designed the circuitry, they made the documentation, and when it was all done they just passed the documentation on to developer support who'd brief the game creators. Really no interactions between the hardware team and the game teams. And so for PlayStation 4 we take a very, very different approach."

How PS4 is going to combat heat

"I think it should be just fine. They know how to design the console so it wont overheat. If you've noticed that PlayStation 4 is smaller, that's because the power consumption's smaller; that simple".

DualShock 4 Motion Controls

"There's very interesting work being done by Media Molecule and others, and I think we're going to have to wait a bit and see how that all turns out... For my game I'm using the DualShock 4, but that's really a reflection of what I'm trying to do. It's sort of a game that speaks to the nostalgia the players have for those character-action games of the past like Crash Bandicoot or Sonic the Hedgehog."

Cloud gaming

"We're very interested in cloud gaming as well; we're in process of integrating Gaikai technology, we're using that in the Remote Play for the Vita... As far as where this heads going forward, I think it's going to be very interesting in five years. Personally I feel that test-to-play is a very interesting concept. It's one of the potential uses of the cloud."

Getting back to the PSOne days

"We really wanted to make it so that the games were easier to make. It got progressively harder on PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 to make the games, development time got longer... We're also seing, because our hardware is more friendly, more easy to use, we're seing a lot more indie development."

The roads ahead

"Right now I'm focused on getting PlayStaton 4 ready, as well as Knack, of course, it's a launch title. Going forward, I don't know, it's been a lot of fun being the creative director of Knack, it's my first time on any project - being the creative director - and I think I'd like to keep doing that in the future."

Keeping adventure in the family

"I don't really look that much at the flow of how genres are received as time goes by. In this case the thought was just very simple; I knew there would be some great core games at launch, like Watch Dogs or Killzone. I just wanted to be sure there'd be something for the rest of the family."

Going Social

"There are a couple of very interesting things that'll happen in the next-gen. One of them is heightened social integration. I also think living software is going to be big. So I talked to a lot of game creators in the process of architecting the PlayStation 4, and very interestingly, many different companies are thinking the same thing that in the future your relationship with the game will be longer.

You won't get that disc and play it, and have it be over when you finish the content on the disc. Is that more content will be coming by every week or month; you'll be downloading new missions, you'll be downloading new parts of the world to explore. In fact, that's a lot of the reason why we put a hard drive in every PlayStation 4, as we wanted to support the paradigm of living worlds going forward."

On the importance of basic game experiences

"Absolutely we can expect games like Marble Madness, I don't think we'll get Marble Madness. I mean, the hardware is much easier to use, indie developers are now making quite a few games for it. And Marble Madness back in the day was a conceptually-driven title, much like the indie developers are creating today. I think that in PlayStation 4 there's going to be a very rich content coming from the indie development community."

This article originally appeared on Gamereactor Spain.