Sony: PS4 Indie Approach Aims to Bring Back "Fun" of PS1 Era
Bring back the indies!
Sony's Mark Cerny has explained how "essential" it was for the company to embrace indie developers, noting that the "variety of experiences" they offer will transform the PlayStation 4 into a system that rekindles the "fun" of the PS1 era.
Speaking at Brighton's Develop conference today, Cerny - who was the lead system architect for the next-generation PS4 console - compared Sony's current indie movement to that of development on the original PlayStation console. Crash Bandicoot, he noted, was developed by only seven people back in the 1990s. And he wants to rekindle that kind of developer environment to result in more varied games.
"There was truly minimal specialisation at [the] time [of the original PlayStation], meaning that a typical individual had a broad creation of a game," Cerny said. "For example, there were no dedicated game designers on that first Crash game. The background artists would freehand the levels themselves... the barriers to create new types of game experiences were quite low."
It was this freedom to create new types of games that Cerny believes generated a "fun factor" within the development studios, and birthed a number of critically-acclaimed PlayStation classics such as the "concept-driven" Parappa the Rapper.
That all changed when the PlayStation 2 was introduced, as Cerny recalls that studios became more interested in developing larger-scale AAA titles, with complex engines and frameworks. This trend, he added, helped shape the innards of the PlayStation 3 - a beast of a console that was dedicated to satisfying developers who wanted to go bigger.
But Cerny said that in this transition, something was lost. "A number of issues began to arose from the design and technology of the PlayStation 3... more often than not, architecture of the hardware in the early days on the PlayStation 3 hampered indie development of the platform. We therefore worked hard to make PlayStation platforms a more welcoming place for indie titles."
Source: Digital Spy
Speaking at Brighton's Develop conference today, Cerny - who was the lead system architect for the next-generation PS4 console - compared Sony's current indie movement to that of development on the original PlayStation console. Crash Bandicoot, he noted, was developed by only seven people back in the 1990s. And he wants to rekindle that kind of developer environment to result in more varied games.
"There was truly minimal specialisation at [the] time [of the original PlayStation], meaning that a typical individual had a broad creation of a game," Cerny said. "For example, there were no dedicated game designers on that first Crash game. The background artists would freehand the levels themselves... the barriers to create new types of game experiences were quite low."
It was this freedom to create new types of games that Cerny believes generated a "fun factor" within the development studios, and birthed a number of critically-acclaimed PlayStation classics such as the "concept-driven" Parappa the Rapper.
That all changed when the PlayStation 2 was introduced, as Cerny recalls that studios became more interested in developing larger-scale AAA titles, with complex engines and frameworks. This trend, he added, helped shape the innards of the PlayStation 3 - a beast of a console that was dedicated to satisfying developers who wanted to go bigger.
But Cerny said that in this transition, something was lost. "A number of issues began to arose from the design and technology of the PlayStation 3... more often than not, architecture of the hardware in the early days on the PlayStation 3 hampered indie development of the platform. We therefore worked hard to make PlayStation platforms a more welcoming place for indie titles."
Source: Digital Spy
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