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BETA | DEVELOPMENT LEGEND // MARK CERNY


Right: Cerny’s career spans decades and countless iconic franchises that he helped created, including Jak & Daxter, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank and Skylanders forebear Spyro the Dragon


took it – I joined a team of scientists that were using this massive detector to search for short-lived elementary particles. I ended up spending my time that summer doing a statistical analysis of millions of particle tracks looking for systematic errors induced by micron-level misalignment of the detector components. And quite frankly, I hated it. In retrospect, this was best thing I could have done – get face-to-face with my ultimate ambition, and fi nd out that I just wasn’t that interested in it. As for what I was


interested in, I was spending a lot of time on hobbyist programming, and playing Space Invaders and the like at the local dive of an arcade – and after some soul-searching I decided to leave the university, and see if I could fi nd a career in video games. Now, at this time, my brother had left to go to college, and my father had just left – the family had shrunk down to just my mother and me. I’m sure my decision to leave the world of academe and hard science behind broke her heart, but she did more than simply


hide her disappointment. She helped in a great number of ways as I searched for, and eventually found and took on, that fi rst job at Atari Games. It’s been over 30 years now, and you know, I’ve never said thank you properly. So let me do that now, with witnesses – thank you very much for that support. Without that, all of this, all I’ve done, could have turned out very diff erently indeed.


Still, though – mysteries of the universe versus video games. That’s a tough one.


16 | AUGUST 2014


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