PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny has recalled his time working at Sega in the late 1980s, a period in which he likened conditions at the company behind Sonic the Hedgehog to a “sweatshop.”
Speaking on the My Perfect Console podcast, Cerny made clear he was talking about Sega’s Tokyo office during a specific period of time, when the company was under immense pressure to compete with the hugely dominant Nintendo, and teams sizes across the video games industry were tiny compared to the projects worked upon today.
“Atari had been one person making a game, maybe two or three,” Cerny recalled. “By this point there were actual teams, it tended to be about three people at Sega making a cartridge. So you’d have a programmer — that was me — a designer and an artist.
“I’ve got to caveat this,” Cerny continued. “I’m only talking about the second half of the 1980s at Tokyo office. But man, Sega was a sweatshop. Three people, three months, that’s a game. And, you know, we would sleep at the office. And this is because [former Sega president Hayao] Nakayama’s idea was, ‘Why is Nintendo successful? They have 40 games. So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna have 80 games for the Master System, and that’s going to be our path to success.'”
In short, Sega’s boss wanted to flood the market with games to simply outnumber the range of titles available on Nintendo’s top-selling NES. But this was the wrong approach, Cerny said, arguing that Sega should have narrowed its focus and encouraged its employees to work in larger teams on fewer, but more impressive titles.
“If you look at the history of games I think if you’re trying to sell a console, you need about two good games, and that sells you your console,” Cerny said. “Like Nintendogs and Brain Training, I think that’s what sold the DS, if I remember that properly for Nintendo. So the bulk software thing is not the approach.”
Ultimately, Sega did allow a particular game more resources: Sonic the Hedgehog. But even then, and alongside its huge success, Cerny says that Sonic’s creator Yuji Naka was berated for going hugely over budget.
“The pressure was to make a game that could sell a million copies. Sega actually had — this was another one of Nakayama’s brainstorms — the Million Seller Project,” Cerny continued. “Sonic was terribly controversial — part of the idea there was, let’s put much more resource on the project than usual… They were going to do, if I remember properly, three people, 10 months. But they ended up needing four and a half people for 14 months — I’m a little hazy on the numbers these days. And though it was a success, they blew their budget so badly… that Yuji Naka was just getting yelled at, and quit the company.”
Asked whether Sega ultimately learnt its lesson from Sonic’s success, Cerny noted that while the game’s huge sales paid off “fantastically” for Sega, “Yuji Naka was pretty tired of the situation by that point.” According to Cerny, Naka had been “making $30,000 a year” at the time of Sonic 1’s success, though this was increased that year because he got the “president’s bonus.”
“I guess that is interesting, how could he be yelled at but get it [the bonus] as well? It was an interesting environment, I have to say,” Cerny mused. “It probably doubled his salary. So, we’re talking about somebody who’s a top-level creator making $60,000 in their best year and getting yelled at a lot. And he’d had it. And so that’s what led to Sonic 2 being developed in the States.”
Cerny also discussed some happier moments from his time at Sega, and noted that his “room of 40 people back in 1987” had included some luminaries of the games industry, including Naka and the late Rieko Kodama, who would go on to create the beloved Skies of Arcadia. Still, Cerny did not stick around long-term, moving back to the U.S. in 1991 (and working on Sonic 2) before eventually beginning his long partnership with PlaySation, for which he is now most famous.
Image credit: Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu/Anadolu Agency/Getty.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
