February 20th, 2013 was a historic day for Sony and PlayStation. That was the day when Sony announced the successor of PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4. The show was a massive success and was met with critical acclaim. The star of the show was PS4’s lead architect Mark Cerny and since then he has become the face of PlayStation. But given that he has never done a press conference representing PlayStation before, what kind of planning did he undertook?
In today’s Develop Conference, Mark Cerny and Andrew House revealed something very interesting about the build up to the reveal event.
“It was great. We developed the hardware with a [tag line] by developers for developers and that morphed into the launch event and I think that changed into consumer focused and developer inspired. It’s a bit broad but it’s in the same spirit. We were creating the hardware for the developers because they are ones who will make games that people want to play. It was a great pleasure being out there and communicate,” Cerny said.
Andrew House chipped in by stating, “I actually remember calling you up and say, ‘there is only one person I think who should be taking care of this portion of the event and your reaction was…”
“You know Mark, you are doing well cause you can talk to hardware developers in the conference room and now how do you feel about getting on stage in front of 5 million people?” Cerny recalled.
“You were up for it?” Andrew asked.
“I was up for it,” Cerny replied.
Thereafter Andrew House revealed that Cerny had in fact memorized his entire presentation without using the teleprompter.
“He took quite a bit of heavy lifting at the early launch event. When we arrived in New York, I said to him ‘How are you feeling about this, are you doing okay?’ And his comment was that ‘I can’t work with teleprompter’. I asked how are you going to do it? He said ‘I will just memorize it.'”
“During the rehearsal, I am looking at the teleprompter, I am sure he had word to word memorized,” Andrew said.
Mark Cerny, a true genius. You can watch some of the highlights of the conference here and here.