Mark Cerny is the man behind the PS4 - as well as having a long and distinguished history actually making games, good games. And he has an amazing story about Sonic Team's Hirokazu Yasuhara and his relationship with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto.Before we get there though, Cerny can sometimes come over as a robotic speaker of PS4 corporate lines; as a man who thinks (knows) that he's smarter than you are. Well, he also points out that:
"At the end of the day, the things that matter are good judgment and hard work, and it’s very important not to get too tricky with what you do... As a child, I was very advanced academically... I was taking college courses at 13, graduated high school at 15, started college at 16. And then I got out into the work world, and I learned that it’s not enough to be quick at thinking, as you have to work very hard as well. And even that’s not enough. You need years of dedication to become good at anything."
What an excellent guy. So, what's with our headline?
Cerny told
IGN about the time that he was 10 years into the industry and working with Sonic Team's Hirokazu Yasuhara, "I noticed that Hirokazu Yasuhara… had a Japanese poem written, and he’d look at it above his desk, he wrote it out, he looked and got pissed off every morning.”
“The poem was very simple. It was ‘Shigeru Miyamoto is a fart.’ And he’d look at that and he’d say ‘why is that guy getting all the credit? I have to show the world that I’m a good guy too.’"
Nice one Mark. A human in an industry of marketeer managers.