PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny recalls his time at Sega in the slow 1980s, when he compared conditions at the company responsible for Sonic the Hedgehog to a “sweatshop.”
Speaking on My perfect console podcast, Cerny made it clear that he was talking about Sega’s Tokyo office during a specific period when the company was under enormous pressure to compete with the extremely dominant Nintendo and the size of teams in the video game industry were diminutive compared to the projects being worked on today.
“Atari was one person making the game, maybe two or three,” Cerny recalled. “By this point there were actual teams, Sega usually had about three people working on a cartridge, so we had a programmer – that was me – a designer and an artist.
In brief, Sega’s boss wanted to flood the market with games to simply outnumber the range of titles available on Nintendo’s best-selling NES. But this was the wrong approach, Cerny said, arguing that Sega should have narrowed its focus and encouraged its employees to work in larger teams on fewer but more impressive titles.
“If you look at the history of gaming, I think if you want to sell a console, you need about two good games and that will sell you the console,” Cerny said. “Like Nintendogs and Brain Training, I think that’s what sold the DS, if I remember correctly, for Nintendo. So mass-market software is not the answer.”
Ultimately, Sega allowed a specific game more resources: Sonic the Hedgehog. But even then, despite its huge success, Cerny says Sonic creator Yuji Naka was criticized for going significantly over budget.
“The pressure was to create a game that could sell millions of copies. Sega actually had – this was another of Nakayama’s brainstorms – a million-seller project,” Cerny continued. “Sonic was terribly controversial – part of the idea was that we would put a lot more resources into the project than usual… They had, if I remember correctly, three people in 10 months. They ended up needing four and a half people in 14 months. I have no clue about the numbers right now. And even though it was a success, they wasted the budget so much… that Yuji Naka just got yelled at and left the company.”
When asked if Sega had ultimately learned from Sonic’s success, Cerny noted that while the game’s massive sales had paid off “fantastically” for Sega, “Yuji Naka was getting pretty tired of the situation at this point.” According to Cerny, Nak “earned $30,000 a year” at the time of Sonic 1’s success, although that amount increased this year because he received a “president’s bonus”.
Cerny also talked about happier moments during his time at Sega, noting that in his “room of 40 people in 1987.” there were several gaming industry luminaries, including Naka and the slow Rieko Kodama, who later created the beloved Skies of Arcadia. Despite this, Cerny didn’t stay here for long, returning to the United States in 1991 (and working on Sonic 2) before eventually beginning the long association with PlaySation for which he is now best known.
Photo credit: Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu/Anadolu Agency/Getty.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s news editor. You can contact Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
