Mark Evan Cerny (/ˈsɜːrni/ SUR-nee; born August 24, 1964)[1] is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and media proprietor.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cerny attended UC Berkeley before dropping out to pursue a career in video games.

In his early years, he spent time at Atari, Sega, Crystal Dynamics and Universal Interactive Studios before becoming an independent consultant under his own company Cerny Games in 1998.

In 2004, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Game Developers Association, and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 2010.

[8] In those earlier days of professional game development, teams were small and each member was responsible for a wider range of roles than today.

I got to work alongside game design legends like Ed Logg, Dave Theurer, Owen Rubin, among many others, during a time when creativity, passion and competition was at a high.

[7] While the development kit had been delivered to Crystal Dynamics by 1994, Cerny had left the studio to lead Universal Pictures' newly formed multimedia division.

[7][12] Cerny had been given a good amount of freedom with the division, stating "The best part about this was that Universal didn't really know the business and as a result I had a great big bag of money to spend and no supervision".

Insomniac similarly had completed their first title Disruptor and Cerny helped them prepare the next game, Spyro the Dragon, which also was picked up and published by Sony in 1998.

Once the engine was complete, Cerny helped both Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their first PlayStation 2 titles, Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and Ratchet & Clank, respectively, as well as several sequels in both series that followed.

[7] In addition to hardware support, Cerny continued to assist Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their first PlayStation 3 titles, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune from Naughty Dog, Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for Insomniac, as well as for other Sony first-party titles, including God of War III and Killzone 3.

[13] Yoshida agreed, which helped to convince the upper management at Sony to allow Cerny to remain a consultant while assigned as the PlayStation 4's lead designer.

He suggested that the pre-production stage should be freeform, allowing the creative persons to explore a game's viability prior to full development.

[7][19] The end product of the preproduction stage under the Method process should be a "publishable first playable" version of the game that can be used to determine the viability of the title.

[20][7] Once the decision is made to move forward on the game, then Cerny recommends by the Method that the typical use of scheduled milestones and deliverables to keep the project on track.

[6][20] IGDA stated, "It's rare to find a 'jack-of-all-trades' who not only has the high-level vision for great game design but can act as the glue to adhere all the pieces together.