Mark Evan Cerny (born August 24, 1964) is an American video game designer, programmer, producer and media proprietor. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cerny attended UC Berkeley before dropping out to pursue a career in video games. In his early years, he spent time at Atari, Sega, Crystal Dynamics and Universal Interactive Studios before becoming an independent consultant under his own company Cerny Games in 1998. While at Sega, he established Sega Technical Institute, working on games including Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992). Cerny has since frequently collaborated with Sony Interactive Entertainment as a consultant, including being the lead designer for hardware of several PlayStation consoles, and has consulted with Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games since their creation in the 1990s, as well as other Sony first-party studios such as Sucker Punch Productions. He has also developed several games, notably the arcade game Marble Madness and the Knack series, and credited on many more for his consulting work. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Game Developers Association, and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 2010. Career 1982–1996: First years Mark Cerny grew up in San Francisco, and was a fan of computer programming and arcade games as a youth. He had attended University of California, Berkeley, but when he was 17 in 1982, he was invited to join Atari, and dropped out of school for the opportunity. He started working in Atari's arcade division on January 18, 1982. In those earlier days of professional game development, teams were small and each member was responsible for a wider range of roles than today. He first worked with Ed Logg on Millipede and Owen Rubin on Major Havoc. Cerny's first major success was the arcade game Marble Madness in which he, at age 18, acted as designer and co-programmer. During this period around 1985, he gained an interest in video game hardware, which Cerny considered far simpler than his later work with the PlayStation. By the end of the 1980s, he joined Sega, initially working at Sega's headquarters in Japan and then returning to the United States by 1991 to help establish the Sega Technical Institute. There, he worked on various Master System and Genesis releases, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join the newly formed Crystal Dynamics.