When he was five years old Mark Cerny taught himself to code. He used a CDC 6400 mainframe computer at the University of California at Berkeley, where his father worked as a lecturer in nuclear chemistry. At thirteen he began to attend maths and physics classes at the university and, when he was sixteen, he joined as a full-time student.

As well as a talent for programming Cerny had a talent for video games. When Cerny saw Space Invaders in a local arcade in 1978 he decided to become “one of the best players in the United States”. His skill brought Cerny to the attention of the author Craig Kubey who, in 1982 was researching a book of arcade game tips. “He was touring the arcades looking for hotshot players, visiting game companies and interviewing game creators,” Cerny tells me. “I was looking for a way to turn my hobbies into a job and Kubey agreed to mention me to Atari during one of his interviews.” Within weeks Cerny was invited to interview for a job at Atari. At 17 he became an employee, working as one of the company’s 15 core game programmers.

Cerny’s career lacks the consistency of focus of, say, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. But he has been either on the periphery or at the very centre of numerous major events in the medium’s evolution. When he was 18 he designed Marble Madness, which went on to become one of Atari’s most successful arcade machines in the mid-1980s. He worked on the seminal platform game Sonic The Hedgehog at Sega in Japan alongside Yuji Naka before returning to California in the mid-1990s to join Universal as VP of its games group. Even at this management position he was still programming video games and designing levels. It was during this time that he met Shuhei Yoshida, a producer in Japan who is now head of Sony’s worldwide studios. Yoshida carried out consumer testing on Cerny’s first project at Universal, the PlayStation game Crash Bandicoot.

Brutal criticisms

“The testers’ comments were brutal: long criticisms of the game by people who were obviously frustrated,” recalls Cerny. “I spent the next six months on that game trying to make it as friendly as it could be.” Later Cerny became a freelancer, working more closely with Sony, optimising games such as Ratchet and Clank and even writing the Dolby Digital Live decoder for the PlayStation 3. But his greatest challenge came in 2008. After a holiday break spent researching the 30-year history of the x86 computer architecture (the foundation of most modern PCs) he mentioned to his old friend Yoshida that he believed a video game console could be built on the same principles. Yoshida promptly appointed Cerny lead architect of PlayStation 4.

Scott Kirkland is group technical director at Evolution Studios, one of Sony’s key development partners and the creator of DriveClub, one of PlayStation 4’s forthcoming titles. “We were asked to come into the studio at midnight on a Sunday in early 2008,” he says. “We weren’t even allowed to mention this to the company’s directors.” The PlayStation 4 project had only been live within Sony for a few weeks. Kirkland was given a San Francisco phone number. He dialed in and the conference call screen blinked to reveal a large meeting room on the other side of the world. At the centre of the room was Mark Cerny.

“We sat from midnight to 2am while Mark explained his vision for the platform,” he recalls. “He revealed his experimental ambitions but, most importantly, the desire present a platform that would be accessible to developers. It was incredibly exciting.” During the next five years Kirkland had regular calls with Cerny, who made good on his promise to involve game developers in the systems design. “We had quite a bit of input in terms of processor technologies, caches and buses and File IO systems and all sorts of aspects of the platform.”

'It's that one'

The key for Kirkland and the rest of the hardware team was to create a system that worked in as similar a way as possible to a PC. “The PlayStation 3 architecture was so different from PC architecture that was a real chore,” he says. “While the engineers loved working on PS3 and there was a real sense of achievement when you got things working, from a commercial perspective it was difficult and expensive to produce games for multiple platforms. Now we're able to exploit the similarities between PC and PlayStation 4. In talking to third parties as well, who develop games for PCs and other consoles - you could just see the relief in their eyes.”

Once the PlayStation 4’s internal architecture was settled, Sony had the challenge of finding a design for the look of the system. The company decided to pass on Takashi Sogabe, who designed the Walkman and, more recently, Sony’s handheld games machine, the Vita. Instead they tasked Tetsu Sumii, a Japanese contractor and talented furniture designer, to work on the machine’s design. “I was not at all happy with the first design Sumii showed me,” says Andrew House, who had final sign off on the designs. “Sumii was very disappointed and then he said, quite correctly: ‘Give me some direction then.’”

House told Sumii that he wanted the design to be “an archetype, a silhouette, in an architectural sense” and “something a kid could draw on a sheet of paper from memory”. Sumii returned with five different designs each one featuring a blue highlight, the PlayStation’s defining colour. House honed it down to three options. “The poor guys had to go and create a design prototype for all three,” says House. “Then [Masayasu] Ito-san, the chief of the home console division and I umm-ed and ahh-ed. In the end we just said: ‘It's that one’.”

Circuit boards and black rubber

As well as the challenge of the console’s design, the PlayStation 4 team wanted to spend an equal amount of thought on the controller, the bridge that carries a player’s inputs and outputs them onto the screen. Cerny, wanting to demonstrate how cumbersome a traditional controller can be to a child, mocked up an oversized scale PlayStation controller, so the designers could feel what it was like for younger players. “Today’s games are enormously complex,” he tells me. “The PlayStation 4 controller has 16 buttons and a blockbuster game uses almost all of them. I’ve had decades to get used to the increasing complexity of video games. But these days children learn how to play games on iPads and smart phones which are button-less. So we have a gulf between the beginner players and the blockbuster game players.”

Evolution’s Kirkland was also involved in the controller’s design. “It was around Christmas 2010 and Yoshida introduced us to Toshi Ioki, the product planning guy who was also looking after the controller,” he says. “We had 9am calls every week with Guerrilla Games, Media Molecule, the hardware guys in Japan and the US … That's the kind of work where you’re pinching yourself not believing it’s real. Then we received this brown box in the post with something that looked like a prop out of a Christopher Nolan Batman movie - all circuit boards and black rubber. We iterated on a number of controller prototypes. I'm not sure how much we can say about the features that fell by the wayside but there were certainly some interesting control mechanisms in there.” At one point the team tried adding a microphone to the controller itself, to negate the need for a headset, but the clacking of the button made it unusable.

Bedroom coders

The invention on display in PlayStation 4’s hardware is interesting, but as its predecessor demonstrated, its software where the true battle for consumers’ hearts and minds will take place. For Sony, who has long supported blockbuster studios such as Evolution and Naughty Dog, indie games are a crucial part of the strategy. It’s in its support of the new generation of bedroom coders that the company has arguably gained the most ground over rival Microsoft.

Rarely has a video game executive enjoyed such an honest moment of joy on stage as Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, when, at E3 2013, he delivered the news that PlayStation 4 will permit used game sales and retail for $100 less than its rival Xbox One. This one-two suckerpunch was aimed at Microsoft’s hardware plans, but it was when Sony called a clutch of indie game makers to the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena stage that the publisher started a fight on the software front.

“We absolutely love scouring the earth for inspirational indie developers,” said Adam Boyes, VP of third party relations at SCE, while the eight creators played their games in a semi-circle of giant screens, front and centre of Sony’s next generation presentation. “We’re developing the worlds best indie game portfolio across all the PlayStation platforms, and giving developers the ability to self-publish their games.”

Sony’s bold pledge to indies was on parade at E3 and, indeed, a number of the system’s most promising launch titles come from independent studios. But does this showboating represent a true commitment? “I do think Sony is real about this,” says Jonathan Blow, creator of the indie smash hit Braid and one of the formative names in the contemporary indie game scene. “Yes, at some level it is a commercial choice because Sony is a big company. But they are very supportive of indie games in a real way. I think that was clear at E3 this year when a huge percentage of Sony's booth space was devoted to indie games. That booth space is hugely expensive. If they just wanted to PR that they support indies, they could just be signing indies but leaving expensive independent game promotion for the AAA games. But they are not doing that; they are doing the real thing.”

Rami Ismail, one of the founders of Vlambeer, the Netherlands-based indie studio behind Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing agrees. “I sincerely believe that the teams that we deal with in Sony are fans of indie games and genuinely care about the games and their creators.” Indeed, Ismail signed a recent deal with Sony in a London pub. “Sony’s Shahid Kamal had seen a really early build of LUFTRAUSERS, our upcoming dogfighting game and got really excited. He asked us what we needed, wrote it down on the back of a napkin and asked if the terms were agreeable. The deal was signed right there on that napkin. We received a real executed version of the contract a few days later and the developer kits we requested arrived within the week. With the bureaucracy that Microsoft had at the time that would've taken us three months.”

Console wars

Video game consoles are expensive and, increasingly, the games they run appear across every machine. For that reason few consumers will purchase both Sony and Microsoft’s machines this Christmas. Instead they will have to make a choice and, having heavily invested in that choice, will be likely to vociferously defend it to their peers. This leads to the so-called "console wars", the playground-esque war of words between the rival console makers and their defenders. Are you "Team Sony" or "Team Microsoft"? It’s a question that Sony has, to a certain extent, played up to in 2013, making viral ads that poke fun at Mircosoft’s previous decision to tie games to player accounts, preventing the sharing or re-sale of games.

This petty (if rather enjoyable) sniping is, perhaps, the last vestige of a hardware-driven industry. Some commentators doubt whether there will be a PlayStation V or Xbox Next in future years, as the world moves towards Spotify-esque cloud-based services. Hardware will continue its trajectory towards obsolescence, as access becomes everything. But, for now, Christmas 2013 is the setting for a traditional face-off between two tech giants, the battle for hearts, minds and wallets, that ungainly trench scramble for the two feet of territory in the living room beneath the television.

Back in Acton, where a film crew hopes to condense PlayStation’s 20-year history into an advertisement, the filming takes a short break. As the fluttering make-up attendants reset the actors’ faces, the ad’s creative director tells me: “One of my friends realised that he’d announced to me that he was getting married, having a baby and getting divorced to me while we were playing PlayStation at different times of our life.” He smiles. “Video games are a part of the larger fabric of our lives. That’s what we’re trying to communicate here.”

The truth in his statement is that video games, not video game consoles are what form our treasured memories. It’s their soundtracks, graphics, sound effects and imprints on our muscles that are able to call up those reminiscences with such force and immediacy. The marque of the console doesn’t matter very much. At least, it doesn’t apart from the fact that PlayStation 4 assuredly delivers on an old, old promise. “We will never withdraw from this business,” said Ogha, 20 years ago. With PlayStation 4 that resolve shows no sign of weakening.

• Part one: PlayStation 4: the rebirth of cool