PlayStaton 4 architect Mark Cerny believes the past offers some great examples for his vision of game development in the next generation.
Speaking to Edge, he said that the original PlayStation era (1994) is still an inspiration to him. "I feel like the magical time was the early years of the PlayStation because there was such a variety of products coming out," he said. "There wasn't this sort of consistent overarching pattern that you might have seen in the last few years in the PlayStation 3 generation, and I really think we're heading back to that time. I think that's a very good thing."
Last week at the Develop conference, Cerny talked about how he became involved in designing the new machine and working with developers around the world. He also spoke about the opportunity to bring independent developers, and all the innovation they represent, to the fore in the next generation.
For Cerny, the parallels with the 1990s are clear. "There was no rulebook, teams were small, projects were cheap, you could make a game for just a couple of hundred thousand dollars," he said. "Some of these games that were made by these tiny teams with these tiny budgets went on to be phenomenally successful."
Cerny began his career as a teenage programmer at Atari, in 1982. He went on to work in senior roles for Sega and Universal Interactive, but is perhaps best known for his contribution to PlayStation classics like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. He began work on the launch of PlayStation 4 in 2007.