PlayStation 5 architect Mark Cerny gave a candid interview on the My Perfect Console podcast published December 2, 2025, describing his time at SEGA’s Tokyo office in the late 1980s as working in a “sweatshop.” The legendary game designer – who worked on Marble Madness at 17 and would later create Crash Bandicoot and design both PS4 and PS5 – recalled teams of just three people being given three months to complete entire games while sleeping at the office. This brutal pace came from SEGA president Hayao Nakayama’s strategy to beat Nintendo by simply flooding the Master System with 80 games versus the NES’s 40 titles. Cerny emphasized he’s only talking about SEGA Tokyo during the second half of the 1980s, not the company overall or in other time periods. But during that specific era, the pressure to create games quickly with minimal resources created an environment where developers routinely worked themselves to exhaustion, including Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka, who was making just $30,000 a year when Sonic 1 became a massive hit.
The Quantity Over Quality Strategy
Mark Cerny explained the root cause of SEGA’s brutal working conditions during this period – president Hayao Nakayama’s misguided belief that the path to beating Nintendo was through sheer volume. “Why is Nintendo successful? They have 40 games,” Nakayama reasoned. “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna have 80 games for the Master System, and that’s going to be our path to success.”
This strategy ignored the reality that Nintendo’s dominance came from quality control. The NES had hit after hit – Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, Castlevania. These weren’t just competent games churned out quickly. They were carefully crafted experiences that defined genres and created franchises lasting decades. SEGA’s approach of flooding the market with twice as many games made by teams working at breakneck pace guaranteed that most of those 80 titles would be mediocre or worse.
Cerny argued that SEGA should have done the opposite – “narrowed its focus and encouraged its employees to work in larger teams on fewer, but more impressive titles.” This philosophy wouldn’t be fully embraced until Sonic the Hedgehog, which Cerny describes as “terribly controversial” internally because it involved putting “much more resource on the project than usual.” The Million Seller Project that produced Sonic represented a shift away from Nakayama’s quantity strategy toward investing properly in games with genuine hit potential.
Three People Three Months
The actual working conditions Cerny describes are shocking even by 1980s standards. A typical SEGA Tokyo project during this era consisted of one or two programmers and sometimes an artist – a total team of three people maximum – given three months to produce a complete game from concept to finished product. For context, modern AAA games employ hundreds or thousands of people over multiple years. Even indie games in 2025 typically have 5-10 person teams working 18-24 months.
Three people making a game in three months is absurd. That’s roughly 90 days to design gameplay systems, program all the code, create art assets, compose music, test for bugs, and produce the final ROM. With weekends, that’s about 60 working days. If each person works 8-hour days (which they definitely didn’t), that’s 1,440 total man-hours for an entire game. Modern games measure development time in hundreds of thousands of hours.
The only way to meet these deadlines was through extreme crunch – working 12-16 hour days, seven days a week, for the entire three-month period. Cerny explicitly states “we would sleep at the office,” confirming that going home wasn’t really an option. Developers would work until they collapsed at their desks, sleep a few hours, wake up, and immediately resume work. This is textbook sweatshop behavior – extracting maximum labor from workers while providing minimal compensation and no work-life balance.
The Room of 40 People
Cerny also described the physical workspace – “one room with about forty people in it” making “essentially all games that would be needed to launch and support the Master System.” Forty developers in one room cranking out games simultaneously explains how SEGA thought they could produce 80 titles. With teams of three working three-month cycles, theoretically you could ship 13 games per three-person team per year. With 13-14 teams operating simultaneously, that’s 170+ games annually if everyone maintains the brutal pace.
Of course, this math ignores human limitations. Burnout, illness, mental health crises, and people simply quitting because the conditions were unsustainable would prevent achieving theoretical maximum output. But the attempt to treat developers as interchangeable production units on an assembly line reflects a dehumanizing approach to game development that, unfortunately, still persists in modified forms today.
Yuji Naka and Sonic’s Success
The podcast discussion revealed important context about Sonic the Hedgehog’s creation and the treatment of its primary developer, Yuji Naka. According to Cerny, when Sonic 1 became a massive hit in 1991, Naka was making just $30,000 a year – roughly equivalent to $65,000-70,000 in 2025 dollars. For creating one of gaming’s most iconic franchises that saved SEGA’s console business, that’s insulting compensation.
Naka did receive a “president’s bonus” that year, bumping his salary higher. But the fact that SEGA’s response to an employee creating a game worth hundreds of millions of dollars was a one-time bonus rather than equity, profit-sharing, or a permanent massive raise reveals the company’s priorities. Developers were seen as costs to minimize, not talent to retain and reward.
Cerny noted that while Sonic’s success paid off “fantastically” for SEGA, “Yuji Naka was pretty tired of the situation by that point.” This exhaustion led to Naka leaving SEGA after Sonic 1’s release. Mark Cerny himself was then sent to the United States to convince Naka to rejoin the company for Sonic 2’s development. Cerny succeeded by offering Naka something SEGA Tokyo never provided – creative freedom and the ability to work at SEGA Technical Institute (STI) in America rather than the sweatshop conditions back in Japan.
Reddit discussions noted that Naka’s relationship with SEGA remained complicated. He threatened to leave multiple times throughout the 1990s unless given complete control over Sonic projects. He refused to let other teams work on Saturn Sonic games, clashed with American developers during Sonic 2’s development, and ultimately departed SEGA in the middle of Sonic 06’s troubled production. This pattern of conflict likely stems from the trauma of being exploited during those early years when he created gaming history while sleeping at the office for poverty wages.
The Luminaries in That Room
Despite the horrific working conditions, Cerny emphasized that the room of 40 people in 1987 included some of gaming’s future legends. Beyond Yuji Naka, the late Rieko Kodama worked there – she would go on to create the beloved Skies of Arcadia and contribute to Phantasy Star and other SEGA classics. Other unnamed developers in that room presumably went on to successful careers across the industry.
This creates a tragic irony. SEGA’s Tokyo office during the late 1980s was simultaneously a sweatshop extracting brutal labor from young developers AND an incubator for generational talent that would define gaming for decades. The question is whether the talent emerged because of or despite the conditions. Cerny seems to believe it was despite – that these developers succeeded not because the crunch made them better, but because they were exceptionally skilled and passionate people who would have thrived anywhere.
Cerny’s Path to PlayStation
Mark Cerny didn’t stick around SEGA long-term. He returned to the United States in 1991, worked on Sonic 2, and eventually moved away from SEGA entirely to pursue other opportunities. His work on Crash Bandicoot and other Sony exclusives in the late 1990s began his long partnership with PlayStation that continues today as the lead architect of both PS4 and PS5 hardware.
The Push Square coverage noted that Cerny’s path to becoming PlayStation’s hardware architect was unusual. During the PS3 era, Sony Computer Entertainment America sent him to Japan to learn everything about the complicated Cell processor architecture so he could teach American first-party teams. While there, Cerny realized he was uniquely qualified to design the next console – he spoke Japanese, understood games, software, and hardware. He pitched himself directly to PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai with the question: “What if I am the architect of the next console?” Hirai said yes, and Cerny designed the PS4 with explicit focus on developer-friendly architecture that avoided PS3’s mistakes.
This origin story connects directly to his SEGA experiences. Cerny learned firsthand how brutal, developer-hostile working conditions create inferior products. When given the opportunity to shape PlayStation’s hardware, he prioritized making developers’ lives easier through straightforward architecture, powerful tools, and listening to what studios actually needed. The PS4’s massive success over Xbox One was largely attributed to Sony respecting developers while Microsoft ignored them. That philosophy comes from someone who survived SEGA’s sweatshop and vowed never to repeat those mistakes.
Caveats and Context
Cerny was careful to emphasize multiple times that he’s specifically talking about SEGA’s Tokyo office during the second half of the 1980s, not the company overall, other regions, or different time periods. SEGA of America apparently had better working conditions. SEGA Technical Institute in the 1990s, which Cerny helped establish, operated differently. And modern SEGA presumably doesn’t run sweatshops.
This specificity is important for fairness and accuracy. Companies change over decades. The person running SEGA Tokyo in 1987 made specific decisions creating those conditions, but that doesn’t mean every SEGA employee everywhere experienced the same thing or that current SEGA bears responsibility for decisions made 40 years ago.
That said, the gaming industry’s crunch culture problems didn’t magically disappear. Rockstar, Naughty Dog, CD Projekt Red, and countless other studios have faced accusations of brutal working conditions in recent years. The specific form has evolved – you’re probably not sleeping at the office anymore – but mandatory overtime, unrealistic deadlines, and burnout remain endemic. Cerny’s SEGA stories from the 1980s serve as historical documentation of where gaming’s toxic work culture originated.
FAQs
When did Mark Cerny work at SEGA?
Late 1980s at SEGA’s Tokyo office. He returned to the US in 1991 and worked on Sonic 2 before eventually moving to PlayStation in the late 1990s.
What does sweatshop mean in this context?
Teams of three people making entire games in three months while sleeping at the office due to extreme crunch. Cerny describes brutal working conditions with minimal compensation and no work-life balance.
Why did SEGA work this way?
President Hayao Nakayama believed flooding the market with 80 Master System games would beat Nintendo’s 40 NES titles through sheer volume. This quantity-over-quality strategy created unsustainable working conditions.
How much did Yuji Naka make creating Sonic?
$30,000 per year when Sonic 1 became a massive hit in 1991. He received a president’s bonus that year but left SEGA anyway, exhausted by the working conditions. Cerny had to convince him to return for Sonic 2.
Is modern SEGA still like this?
Cerny emphasized he’s only talking about SEGA Tokyo in the late 1980s, not the company today. Modern labor laws and industry standards have presumably changed working conditions significantly.
What podcast is this from?
My Perfect Console podcast with Simon Parkin, published December 2, 2025. The episode includes extended discussion of Cerny’s career from SEGA through PlayStation.
Did Cerny work on Sonic?
Yes, Sonic 2 after he returned to the US in 1991. He also helped establish SEGA Technical Institute where Sonic 2 was developed with better working conditions than Tokyo.
How old was Cerny at SEGA?
Early twenties. He famously created Marble Madness at 17 years old and had already established himself as a prodigy before joining SEGA Tokyo.
What did Cerny do after SEGA?
Created Crash Bandicoot and worked on various Sony exclusives in the late 1990s. Became PlayStation’s lead hardware architect, designing both PS4 and PS5 with developer-friendly philosophy influenced by his SEGA experiences.
Conclusion
Mark Cerny’s description of SEGA Tokyo as a sweatshop in the late 1980s provides disturbing historical documentation of gaming’s crunch culture origins. The strategy of flooding markets with quantity over quality, exploiting young developers through brutal working conditions, and compensating generational talent with poverty wages represents everything wrong with the industry’s approach to labor. That Yuji Naka created Sonic the Hedgehog while making $30,000 a year and sleeping at the office is a damning indictment of SEGA’s priorities during that era. While Cerny carefully emphasizes this is specific to one office in one time period, the broader implications remain relevant – the gaming industry still struggles with crunch, burnout, and treating developers as disposable resources rather than talent to nurture. Cerny’s journey from surviving SEGA’s sweatshop to designing PlayStation hardware with explicit focus on developer-friendly architecture shows that traumatic experiences can inform better practices. Whether the industry broadly learns these lessons or continues repeating variations of Hayao Nakayama’s mistakes remains an open question nearly 40 years later.