Mark Cerny is well known for his work on Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, and Spyro, but his most recent efforts helped give rise to the PlayStation 4 and the platformer Knack. Now, Cerny is moving onto new projects, and he's focusing on games.
In an interview with IGN at the Develop Conference going on this week, Mark Cerny revealed that he's turning back to game development to take a break from working on hardware and technology. In fact, he's starting to make a game right now with a much smaller focus than Knack. "One of the projects I'm trying to kick off is a so-called 'indie title'," he explained. "It won't really be an indie title because it'll be fully funded, but it'll be nice to have a project where the scope is small enough that I'll know the names of everybody on the team, which is really hard to do these days now that you've got 100, 200, 300 people internal plus everyone outside the company."
He's moving to smaller projects because of the creative freedom that comes with a reduced scope. "With the big titles you have to think very carefully about what you're trying to accomplish and how that will integrate with the existing market," he said, "but so much about the smaller titles is excitement and freshness."
But Cerny is certainly not abandoning his last project, the PS4 launch title Knack. Although the game wasn't critically acclaimed, Cerny believes that there is still a lot of room to work in the Knack world. When asked if there would ever be a sequel, he responded, "I would love to keep working with the [Knack] brand, definitely. There's a lot unexplored there, I think anybody who played the game would tell you that."
Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news about Cerny's new project. What would you like to see next from Cerny, one of the people behind Resistance, Jak & Daxter, and Ratchet & Clank? Let us know in the comments.
