If you hadn't heard of Mark Cerny before he debuted the PS4, it wouldn't be too surprising. The game consultant hasn't had his name on the front of a box, but his presence has been felt from Atari arcade cabinets to next-gen systems.

Cerny outlined how his wide career experiences influenced his approach to designing PS4 in Barcelona's GameLab conference. Check out his roughly 45-minute long talk below (the PS4 stuff starts at about 34 minutes in, but you won't regret watching the whole thing).



Making PS4 hardware "easy to learn but difficult to master"--i.e., easy to start with, but with plenty of complexity to pick up down the line--figured into the PS4's familiar architecture.

This let Sony bring "time to triangle," or the time it takes to get your game displaying graphics, down to a month or two. That's how long it took to get a game working on PlayStation, and significantly shorter than the six to 12 months needed for PS3 development. Maybe that's how Sony has been able to wrangle together so many games.