'Sega was a sweatshop' – PlayStation architect Mark Cerny recalls working in Tokyo in the late 1980s and witnessing Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka 'being yelled at regularly'

PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny recalls his time working at Sega in the late 1980s, comparing the company's situation during this period to falling behind Sonic the Hedgehog to “sweatshops.”

talking about my perfect console In the podcast, Cerny made it clear that he was talking about what Sega's Tokyo offices were like during a specific time, when the company was under intense pressure to compete with the dominant Nintendo and the video game industry as a whole had very small team sizes compared to today's projects.

“Atari was one person making a game, maybe two or three people,” Cerny recalled. “By then, there was a real team in place, usually three people at Sega working on the cartridges. So you would have a programmer – that was me – a designer and an artist.

“I have to warn about this,” Cerny continued. “I'm just talking about what it was like in the Tokyo office in the second half of the 1980s. But, Sega was a sweatshop. Three people, three months, and that's one game. And, you know, we would sleep in the office. It was because[former Sega president]Nakayama's idea was, 'Why is Nintendo successful? They have 40 games. So what are we going to do? We're going to have 80 games for the Master System, and that's how we became successful.'”

In short, Sega's bosses wanted to flood the market with games that far exceeded what was available on Nintendo's best-selling NES. But Cerny said that was the wrong approach, arguing that Sega should narrow its focus and encourage employees to work on fewer but more impressive games in larger teams.

“If you look at the history of gaming, I think if you wanted to sell a console, you needed about two good games so you could sell your console,” Cerny said. “Like Nintendogs and BrainTrain, if I remember correctly, I think that was the selling point of the DS. So batch software wasn't the answer.”

Eventually, Sega did provide more resources for a specific game: Sonic the Hedgehog. But even so, Cerny said that in addition to being a huge success, Sonic creator Yuji Naka was also blamed for going way over budget.

“The pressure was to make a game that would sell a million copies. Sega actually had – and this was another brainstorm from Nakayama – the Million Seller Project,” Cerny continued. “Sonic was hugely controversial – one of the ideas was, let's put more resources into the project than we normally would… If I remember correctly, they were originally going to do it with three people, for 10 months. But they ended up needing four and a half people, for 14 months – I'm a little fuzzy on numbers these days. While it was a success, they were seriously over budget… Naka Yuuji just got scolded and quit the company.”

When asked if Sega ultimately learned from Sonic's success, Cerny noted that while the game's huge sales brought “huge” returns to Sega, “Naka ​​Yuuji was very tired of the situation at the time.” At the time of Sonic 1's success, Naka was “making $30,000 a year,” according to Cerny, though his income increased that year because he received a “presidential bonus.”

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