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Mark Cerny is best known as the soft-spoken engineer who serves as PlayStation's lead console architect, having designed the PS4, PS5, and yes, even the Vita. But his history with PlayStation goes back much further to his time as president of Universal Interactive Studios, where he helped produce Spyro the Dragon. Despite the executive title, Cerny was very serious about the game, to the point where he was single-handedly trying to kick off its speedrunning scene back in 1998.
In the December 1998 issue of Next Generation magazine, Cerny was asked if he was the best at Spyro, which had just launched a few months earlier. "I don't know," he replied. "I'm thinking of having a competition among the team to see who can finish the game fastest. I'll put up a large monetary prize, thus motivating me to practice a lot, become the best, and not have to pay out any money."
This was, of course, well before speedruns had become popular, and the communities racing to beat single-player games as quickly as possible were fairly niche. Nonetheless, Cerny was keen to get normal Spyro players in on the action.
"I've reached and beaten Gnasty Gnorc in 105 minutes," Cerny said, referring to the game's final boss. "If anyone can beat that, please send me your time." He even included an email address for speedrunning fans to send their times into.
It's unclear if anybody took up Cerny's challenge at the time, but the modern Spyro speedrunning community recognizes his ambition. His 1 hour and 45 minute time is listed as the first world record for Spyro on Speedrun.com, and it took more than 12 years for anyone to beat it. Or, at least, it took that long for anybody to upload and verify a faster time online.
This bit of trivia was mentioned in a recent Summoning Salt video going over the history of Spyro world records, which is what you'll want to look at if you want a detailed breakdown of how the game's speedrunning scene has evolved since Cerny first laid out his challenge. Spoiler alert: the times are a lot faster these days.
