Mark Cerny's career has taken him to Atari, Crystal Dynamics, Universal Interactive Studios, Naughty Dog, Insomniac and Sony, but one of his most interesting places of employment has to be Sega.
Speaking on Simon Parkin's My Perfect Console podcast, Cerny – the lead architect behind the PS4, PS Vita, and PS5 – gives some insight into the intense working environment at the company in Japan, which he joined in the '80s during the Master System era.
Cerny – who would eventually move back to the US to establish the Sega Technical Institute – explains that Sonic the Hedgehog was the game which marked a change for the company in its battle with Nintendo.
"The pressure was to make a game that could sell a million copies," he says, explaining that prior to Sonic, Sega's aim was to pump out as many titles as quickly and cheaply as possible in an attempt to beat Nintendo through sheer volume. "This is another one of [Hayao] Nakayama's brainstorms, the 'Million Seller Project'."
While hindsight has proven the strategy to be correct – Sonic was a massive critical and commercial success – Cerny reveals that it caused quite a bit of drama within Sega's offices.
"Sonic was terribly controversial. Part of the idea there was, let's put much more resources on this project than we usually do. What's usual – three people, three months. So they were going to do, if I remember properly, three people, ten months. But they ended up needing four and a half people for 14 months. I'm a little hazy on the numbers these days. And though it was a success, they blew their budget so badly by putting in a couple of engineering years on this, that Yuji Naka was just getting yelled at and quit the company."
That Naka left Sega after Sonic was finished isn't new information, but Cerny is able to shed a little more light on the reasons for his departure.
"[Sonic] pays off fantastically well for Sega. But Yuji Naka was pretty tired of the situation by that point. I mean, he was making $30,000 a year."
Cerny then reveals that Naka would have gotten a bonus from Sega president Nakayama for his efforts, but this would only have doubled his salary. "We're talking about somebody who's a top-level creator making $60,000 in their best year and gets yelled at a lot, and he'd had it. And so that's what led to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 being developed in the States because we didn't have those rules."
The legendary game designer and system architect also reveals that Sega wasn't keen for a Sonic sequel to go into development immediately after the first game launched, hence the scramble to assemble a team in the US to work on Sonic 2.
"Yuji Naka had quit, so they were missing their programmer. And [Hirokazu] Yasuhara was already slated to be in the States, so they're missing their designer," says Cerny when explaining the utter chaos which accompanied the genesis of Sega Technical Institute.
"The real puzzle for me is why headquarters in Tokyo didn't say, wow, this is like something we need to support full force. Sure, everybody's in the States, but how do we get that going? There was a degree of support for it, but it certainly didn't feel like much of a priority for the people back home. Frankly, it didn't even feel like a priority for Sega of America, because nobody realised how big Sonic was going to be. Sonic ships, and almost immediately, I've got the team ready to work on a sequel, and due on a sequel, and I've got Sega of America saying, no, no, no, it's much too soon. do a different game first, maybe come back to Sonic in a year or two. And wow, did they reverse themselves on that fast once they saw the Christmas sales of that Sonic."
Naka – who was found guilty of insider trading in 2023 – would rejoin Sega Technical Institute in the US on a higher salary, yet he famously disliked working with Americans and was once described by STI artist Craig Stitt as "an arrogant pain in the ass".
Cerny goes on to talk about how difficult it was to work at Sega under someone as domineering as Nakayama, who was President and CEO of Sega Enterprises from 1983 to 1999.
"I had to quit coffee one month after joining Sega because my stomach hurt so bad. And one month after I left Sega, I was back drinking coffee again.
I'll just give you one example is I'm starting up the Sega Technical Institute and you couldn't make a game for $100,000 those days. We were up to maybe $200,000 or $300,000 for making a game. So he comes by and I'm scrambling because the Visa problems and trying to hire Americans and trying to get going, and he wants a review of what the Sega Technical Institute is doing.
And I have spent a total of $100,000 and he wants to know why we haven't shipped a game yet. Now, mind you, none of our budgets were less than $100,000 for the things that we were trying to make. It's a completely unfair question. But that was him. He was just going to put pressure in any way possible on his staff because his belief was that, I guess, pressure makes diamonds? I don't know. So getting out of Sega was a very healthy thing."
However, he's keen to point out that "Nakayama is amazing. He understood games like nobody's business, and those arcade successes for Sega, he had so much to do with that. It's just that working for Nakayama was... that was difficult. And seven years of that was enough. I mean, I left. I was on very good terms with him. We'd go out to dinner after I'd left and talk shop. I just wasn't going to work eight, nine, ten years for Sega."
You can check out the full interview, which covers Cerny's entire career, in the latest episode of My Perfect Console.