Cerny: Knack’s a 'Second Purchase' Game For PlayStation 4

In 2013, no single Sony employee has been more visible than Mark Cerny. Cerny has been in the industry for a very long time – he designed the classic game Marble Madness when he was 18 years old back in 1984 – but it’s his work as the Lead Architect of PlayStation 4 that has brought him back into the spotlight.

During a visit to Sony’s Japan Studio in Tokyo to see Cerny’s upcoming PlayStation 4 launch title Knack, I was given the opportunity to speak with him one-on-one, and it was then that I got to follow-up with him about something he said during his Knack presentation earlier in the day. He stated during the presentation that he envisions Knack as being a “second purchase” game on PlayStation 4, or a game you buy in addition to a different, core title. I wanted to follow-up with him about that, and what exactly that meant.

“Crash Bandicoot was the top-selling brand for PlayStation One, but the world has changed,” Cerny said. “I think part of the reason we were creating mascot-type games in those days was that that was what the hardware could support. We made games with characters with big heads because we had pixels the size of your fist, and we just didn’t have very many of them as a result.”

But all of that changed when the capabilities of the hardware allowed designers to create more photorealistic games. And Cerny and his contemporaries realized that the audience actually preferred those games over the mascot titles he helped to create in the past, like Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank.

“Also, our audience has been growing up steadily,” he continued. “Our audience was primarily teenagers back in those early days, the Sonic the Hedgehog days… so it’s very clear that the center of gaming has moved away from character action games.”

So with that said, where does Knack fit in the PlayStation 4 ecosystem? And why create a game in a genre that appears to be waning? Well, for one, Cerny likes making platformers. He has roots in the genre going all the way back to Kid Chameleon and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega Genesis. But he also believes that they’re a great way to get non-gamers into console gaming. Knack, in a sense, is way to coerce people into a world they may not otherwise know they were interested in.

“I knew there’d be a lot of core games at launch,” Cerny admitted, “but I just didn’t see there being softer titles at launch. So as a core gamer, certainly you’re going to buy PlayStation 4 and Killzone, Watch Dogs, Destiny. But what about the rest of the family? And that was kind of the first thought behind Knack.”

Knack launches alongside PlayStation 4 this November. While you wait for our full review of the game, check out our two most recent previews, one from E3, and the other from Gamescom.

Colin Moriarty is IGN’s Senior Editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.

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