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PS4 or against ?

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Hi,

Here's what I read at
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517276/the-man-who-drew-up-sonys-next-game-plan/>

*The Man Who Drew Up Sony’s Next Game Plan*
By Simon Parkin on August 20, 2013

Mark Cerny’s soft voice and youthful looks belie the position of power
he holds in the video-game industry. The 49-year-old Californian is the
lead architect of Sony’s PlayStation 4, the company’s forthcoming
video-game console cum entertainment hub, which is destined to arrive
in millions of living rooms around the globe this winter. As such he is
partly responsible for defining the next generation of video-game
consoles and shaping the broader influence of these increasingly
pervasive devices. It is a unique challenge in technological design.
Unlike PCs, smartphones, or televisions, new video-game consoles launch
only intermittently, every seven years or so. The design must be robust
enough to remain relevant in a rapidly shifting technological landscape
over an extended period.

Finding the right balance is a high-risk game: at launch, the
PlayStation 4 will go up against Microsoft’s Xbox One, its principal
rival, which is also slated for release in December. The stakes for
both companies extend beyond video games. Both Sony and Microsoft
harbor an ambition to “control” the living room via their machines,
which will act not only as game consoles but also as central hubs
through which households access television shows, movies, sports, and
music. Microsoft is eager to stress Xbox One’s multimedia capabilities,
dubbing the system an “all-in-one entertainment system” to rival the
Apple TV and Google TV platforms. But  “play” remains at the heart and
brand of the PlayStation, and Sony believes that the quality and
quantity of the system’s games will ultimately win this war.

How does one create the blueprints for a system that can last the
distance without becoming outdated? How do you build an architecture
that is straightforward enough for third parties to create games with,
but also innovative enough to facilitate bold, eye-catching invention?
For Sony, whose three previous PlayStation systems have sold an
estimated 335 million units, these are multimillion-dollar
questions—and the Japanese company has tasked Cerny with answering
them. His approach is shaped by a deep passion for innovative games,
and by his experience making simple but addictive arcade games.

Cerny’s talent for programming surfaced early. At age five he taught
himself to code on a CDC 6400 mainframe computer at the University of
California at Berkeley, where his father worked as a lecturer in
nuclear chemistry. At 13 he began to audit math and physics classes at
the university, and at 16 he joined full-time. “I was quite a good
student, but I was bored,” he says.

As well as a talent for programming, Cerny had a talent for arcade
games, the new and vibrant industry launched when Atari founder Nolan
Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet, Computer Space, in the
Dutch Goose bar near Stanford University in 1971. When Cerny saw Space
Invaders in a local arcade in 1978, he was immediately entranced and
worked to become “one of the best players in the United States at that
time.” This skill brought Cerny to the attention of the author Craig
Kubey, who in 1982 was researching a book of arcade game tips and
interviews. “He was touring the arcades looking for hotshot players,
visiting game companies and interviewing game creators,” explains
Cerny. “I was looking for a way to turn my hobbies into a job, and
Kubey agreed to mention me to Atari during one of his interviews.”
Kubey was true to his word, and within weeks, Cerny was invited for an
interview. At just 17 he joined Atari as one of the company’s 15 star
programmers—the only employees responsible for both code and game
design.

Cerny’s was a family of high-achieving academics. Both of his parents
and his brother have PhDs, as do four of his stepsiblings. In that
environment, quitting education to make video games at 17 was akin to
running away with the circus. “Certainly everyone would have liked to
see me complete my higher education,” he says. “But I only thought I’d
be at Atari for a year, gaining some experience. It was seven years
before I realized I wasn’t going back to college. My family eventually
came to terms with it when it became clear I could make enough money in
games to support myself.”

Cerny cut his teeth on the game Major Havoc, and at 18 he was given
carte blanche to create his own game. “They sat me down and told me to
figure out what game I wanted to make and what hardware it would need
to run on,” he says. “I was told that if it needed some artwork, they
could probably spare somebody for a couple of days. But it was pretty
much one person per project.” Cerny’s interest in emerging
technology—the same interest that marked him out to Sony as the ideal
candidate to design PlayStation 4 three decades later—was evident in
his first idea. “Marble Madness started life as miniature golf played
via a touch screen,” he explains. “Then we added a trackball that
people could roll with their hand to directly control the marble.
Initially it was a motorized trackball, but the costs proved
prohibitive.”

The latest PlayStation 4 controller shows efforts at interface
innovation: it includes a small touchpad as well as more sensitive
motion sensors, allowing new ways to play games. The Xbox One, of
course, comes with Microsoft’s Kinect, a hands-free motion-sensing
device.

When Atari games were 80 percent complete, one or two cabinets would be
installed in local bars for live play-testing. “We’d watch people play
the game in secret, see if it was too hard or too easy,” he recalls. If
the game didn’t prove popular enough it was canceled at this point; two
out of every three games didn’t make it. Marble Madness, however,
became one of the smash hits in the arcade in the mid-1980s.

Flushed with success, Cerny quit Atari to start work on his own games
as an independent developer. But working simultaneously on the hardware
and software proved tremendously time-consuming for one man. After 18
months, he dropped the project and moved to Japan to become a
contractor for Sega, creating games for its Master System console. “It
was like night and day,” he says of the change in corporate culture.
“At Atari it was all about creativity; if the concept wasn’t 100
percent original, you couldn’t make it. Sega was about shoveling the
titles out the door. We made 40 games, but by my judgment, only two
were really worth playing. We didn’t get out of that churn philosophy
until Sonic the Hedgehog.”

The shift from arcades to home consoles was changing the way games were
designed. Where arcade games had to “kill the player three times in
three minutes” in order to earn money, home consumers wanted longer and
more accessible games. Cerny left Sega and returned to California to
join Universal in the mid-1990s as vice president of the studio’s
interactive group. Even in this management position he was still
programming games and designing levels. It was during this time that he
met Shuhei Yoshida, a producer in Japan who is now head of Sony’s
worldwide studios. Yoshida carried out consumer testing on Cerny’s
first project, Crash Bandicoot. “He gave me the testers’ notes,” says
Cerny. “It was a litany of criticisms of the game by people who were
obviously frustrated by its difficulty. It hit me that arcade-style
games were not the sort of products we should be making anymore.”

This act of having to relearn a design approach in a changing world has
defined Cerny’s career. Today Cerny is back to working simultaneously
on hardware and software as lead architect on PlayStation 4 and
designer on one of its launch titles, Knack—a bright and colorful
platform game that harks back to Cerny’s work on Crash Bandicoot and
has little of the grit and violence of most contemporary video-game
blockbusters. “Today’s games are enormously complex,” he says. “The
PlayStation 4 controller has 16 buttons and a blockbuster game uses
almost all of them. I’ve had decades to get used to the increasing
complexity of video games. But these days children learn how to play
games on iPads and smartphones, which are buttonless. So we have a gulf
between the beginner players and the blockbuster game players. I wanted
to make a game and a system that acts as a bridge between the two.”

For Cerny, the key to PlayStation 4’s success when it launches this
holiday season is in offering a breadth of experiences, both the
sprawling blockbuster epics of the mega-studios and the smaller
independently created titles from today’s clutch of bedroom
programmers. Sony’s commitment to the so-called indie scene is
full-throated and in apparent contrast to Microsoft, which has
attracted criticism from some quarters for its seeming lack of interest
and support. “We have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the
landscape of gaming by bringing these diverse titles together,” says
Cerny. “I believe there is a much richer set of game experiences on the
horizon.”

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PS4 or against ? Francois LE COAT <lecoat@atari.org> - 2013-08-27 23:15 +0200

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