cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/0...-on-his-fascination-with-playstation-trophies
More questions at link above
Cerny, 56, has picked up 33 Platinum Trophies on PlayStation 4. A few of these Platinums are gimmies that are automatically unlocked by finishing a game, but most took considerable time, effort, and skill. He’s currently pursuing Platinum number 34 in the brutally difficult Cuphead. Cerny believes his completionist approach stems from a similar drive he had in the 1980s when he was trying to get high scores in arcade games.
“In some ways, I feel like I’m learning what the developer values most in the game that they created,” Cerny told me in a video call from his home office, which is peppered with eye-opening game memorabilia, including a Marvel’s Spider-Man poster signed by various Insomniac Games developers.
Game Informer: Take me back to your early days of gaming. You told me you played a lot of Defender.
Mark Cerny: I was a huge arcade player, starting with Space Invaders. I cut my teeth on that and Asteroids and a couple of more games. I never really got into Centipede, but I was crazy in love with Missile Command and Defender. Pretty much my spare time in late high school and college was in the arcades playing these games. Part of [the allure] was the controls. It wasn’t like the Atari 2600, where you had one button. You had a dial for Missile Command, Defender had its seven buttons and joystick, and Robotron had two joysticks. I loved that.
They were really hard games. When we look at Cuphead today, we say, “Oh my god, I played that first run-and-gun level and must have died 50 times.” That’s only replicating the typical arcade difficulty back in the 1980s. With arcade games, you had to kill the player in three minutes as a design rule. We got test data on a game that was four-and-a-half minutes, and clearly, that game was never going to succeed because it wasn’t killing the player fast enough.
Talk to me about your history with Trophies. When did you develop a desire to go for the Platinum?
On PlayStation 3, I didn’t get any Trophies. I did most of my playing then prior to launch on my dev kit, so I don’t have much of a visible history on PlayStation 3. When I got PlayStation 4 and was on social networks, I thought it would be fun to expose everything I was doing to players.
For me, the way it started was Resogun, which is basically Defender. That’s where I started getting into the Trophies. I was like, “I might be able to get the Platinum.” I was in the top 10 on the international leaderboards for some of the categories. I got confidence from that.
The other thing, the number-two guy on [PlayStation] hardware is a guy at Naughty Dog, and we got into a competition. He had eight Platinum Trophies, and I had six. I’m still losing seven years later, but I’m still proud of where I’m at with 33 Platinums. He’s at 40 something. We still give each other crap about it. He got a Platinum in Job Simulator. Now how hard is that? [laughs] In his defense, he wasn’t even going for it – it just popped up – so he says.
What about Knack 1 and 2? These are two games you helped create.
These are worth pointing out. I play my own games to get the Platinum because I want to know what the experience is like. For Knack, it was not very enjoyable getting the Platinum. It pops out randomly. The time commitment isn’t bad, but the random nature of things makes it just brutal. We fixed that for Knack II.
You are in an elite crew as one of the people to get the Platinum Trophy in Invisible, Inc. Only .1 percent of players have gotten it. How many players is that?
I don’t think we display anything lower than .1 percent. It has to be less than 100 people. It took me months to get that, and part of that is I don’t have much time in a day to play. Maybe 30 minutes. And then there are the weekends.
Where are you at in it?
I’ve beaten it, but now I have to do it on the expert difficulty. Because I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it or not, I’m starting on the toughest bosses – the ones people say they gave up on. If I can get through the toughest five, then I’ll know I can do everything else. I’ve taken down one of the top five. I just finished it this past weekend.
More questions at link above
Cerny, 56, has picked up 33 Platinum Trophies on PlayStation 4. A few of these Platinums are gimmies that are automatically unlocked by finishing a game, but most took considerable time, effort, and skill. He’s currently pursuing Platinum number 34 in the brutally difficult Cuphead. Cerny believes his completionist approach stems from a similar drive he had in the 1980s when he was trying to get high scores in arcade games.
“In some ways, I feel like I’m learning what the developer values most in the game that they created,” Cerny told me in a video call from his home office, which is peppered with eye-opening game memorabilia, including a Marvel’s Spider-Man poster signed by various Insomniac Games developers.
Game Informer: Take me back to your early days of gaming. You told me you played a lot of Defender.
Mark Cerny: I was a huge arcade player, starting with Space Invaders. I cut my teeth on that and Asteroids and a couple of more games. I never really got into Centipede, but I was crazy in love with Missile Command and Defender. Pretty much my spare time in late high school and college was in the arcades playing these games. Part of [the allure] was the controls. It wasn’t like the Atari 2600, where you had one button. You had a dial for Missile Command, Defender had its seven buttons and joystick, and Robotron had two joysticks. I loved that.
They were really hard games. When we look at Cuphead today, we say, “Oh my god, I played that first run-and-gun level and must have died 50 times.” That’s only replicating the typical arcade difficulty back in the 1980s. With arcade games, you had to kill the player in three minutes as a design rule. We got test data on a game that was four-and-a-half minutes, and clearly, that game was never going to succeed because it wasn’t killing the player fast enough.
Talk to me about your history with Trophies. When did you develop a desire to go for the Platinum?
On PlayStation 3, I didn’t get any Trophies. I did most of my playing then prior to launch on my dev kit, so I don’t have much of a visible history on PlayStation 3. When I got PlayStation 4 and was on social networks, I thought it would be fun to expose everything I was doing to players.
For me, the way it started was Resogun, which is basically Defender. That’s where I started getting into the Trophies. I was like, “I might be able to get the Platinum.” I was in the top 10 on the international leaderboards for some of the categories. I got confidence from that.
The other thing, the number-two guy on [PlayStation] hardware is a guy at Naughty Dog, and we got into a competition. He had eight Platinum Trophies, and I had six. I’m still losing seven years later, but I’m still proud of where I’m at with 33 Platinums. He’s at 40 something. We still give each other crap about it. He got a Platinum in Job Simulator. Now how hard is that? [laughs] In his defense, he wasn’t even going for it – it just popped up – so he says.
What about Knack 1 and 2? These are two games you helped create.
These are worth pointing out. I play my own games to get the Platinum because I want to know what the experience is like. For Knack, it was not very enjoyable getting the Platinum. It pops out randomly. The time commitment isn’t bad, but the random nature of things makes it just brutal. We fixed that for Knack II.
You are in an elite crew as one of the people to get the Platinum Trophy in Invisible, Inc. Only .1 percent of players have gotten it. How many players is that?
I don’t think we display anything lower than .1 percent. It has to be less than 100 people. It took me months to get that, and part of that is I don’t have much time in a day to play. Maybe 30 minutes. And then there are the weekends.
Where are you at in it?
I’ve beaten it, but now I have to do it on the expert difficulty. Because I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it or not, I’m starting on the toughest bosses – the ones people say they gave up on. If I can get through the toughest five, then I’ll know I can do everything else. I’ve taken down one of the top five. I just finished it this past weekend.
