Good Games From a Naughty Dog

technologically oriented. I'm the technology guy. Fun story. The reason I'm the tech guy is because many years ago at How Stuff Works, we had decided that all the writers were going to specialize in different fields, and we're all liberal arts graduates, and it turned out I was the one guy who wasn't afraid of technology. That's how I landed this gig. Actually, I argue that I had the best gig out of everybody, because technology either works or

it doesn't. Everything else is a lot more fuzzy. Today, we're gonna talk about a topic that gets a little fuzzy at times. Uh, We're gonna talk about a video game company. Now. A few years ago, this particular video game studio got started by two teenage boys, and just a just a couple of years ago, it hit its

thirtieth anniversary. If you had picked up the first couple of games that that studio produce, you probably would not have predicted that the company would go on to create some of the most popular games for Sony's PlayStation consoles, which makes sense because at that time PlayStation didn't even exist, So how could you predict this? But the studio was Naughty Dog, and this is its story, and the story is so big, so epic, and I'm not making that up that this is going to be a two parter.

So in this first part we're going to focus on the formation of Naughty Dog and how it grew into a big studio. Now that those two teenage founders were actually not even teenagers when they first met one another. Their names are Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin. They met when they were twelve years old. They were attending Hebrew school and preparing for their individual bar mitzvahs. Now, Ruby and Gavin shared a common passion which was video games. Actually it was a little broader than that. It was

computers and video games. Both of them had a fascination with them and had each worked independently to learn how to program computers and build their own video games. Now they each had Apple two computers, and they had been building these little programs using those computers. Gavin had actually

gone to the trouble of learning assembly language programming. Rubin largely programmed in Apple Basic, and they, along with a couple of other classmates at Hebrew School, would have these little quick conversations about games and programming, and they focused on that a little bit more than they were their actual studies in preparation for their apartments, because they found it really fascinating and fun and they were passionate about it,

and Gavin and Rubin soon discovered that their individual skills would complement the others, where one person might not be as strong the one was, and so they ended up realizing that they could form together to create a sort of computer vultron Andy Gavin was the better programmer of the two, and his games would typically run pretty well with very few bugs or glitches, but he was not a very strong artist. He had not developed artistic skills,

and so his games often didn't look like much. Jason Rubin, on the other hand, was a very gifted artist, but his code wasn't the tightest and his games would often crash or run slowly. So the two decided that it made the most sense to work together and have Reuben concentrate on graphic design and Gavin would focus on game engine and mechanic design. Now, this was in the early nineteen eighties. Now that was a time when it was possible for maybe one or two people to make a

full game from start to finish. So games like the early Ultimate Titles were proof of this. That was the work of Richard Garriott, primarily in the first few games. It took some imagination and skill to create a compelling game, but the relatively low bar for technical requirements meant that things were not yet so complicated that it would require specialized talent to pull it off. The machines that were running these games were fairly primitive, especially by today's standards.

They they're more primitive than the most basic version of a smartphone out there. So being that simple, comparatively speaking, was a benefit for anyone who wanted to make content. You had restrictions you had to work within, and you couldn't try and tackle a game that was too complicated because there literally weren't any machines that could run those games, so you could be a generalist and find success. This

was an era before the World Wide Web. The Internet itself did technically exist, but it was very young and limited to eggheads and research facilities and universities. Jason Reuben and Andy Gavin didn't even have the benefit of a large library of computer programming books to pull from, because it was still a pretty young yield. There were books on programming, but they were few and far between and they weren't necessarily easy to find, so they did their best.

They worked together. They read a magazine called Bite Magazine that had a lot of programming tips inside of it, and they would occasionally consult with other people on computer forums that were on bulletin board systems and things like that in order to get a little more information. Uh Reuben would refer to them as Gandolf's. There would be someone who would have at least a little more information than you did, and they were happy to share it.

And they learned largely through this process and through teaching themselves. Their first real collaboration was a faithful port of an existing game. That game was Nintendo's Punch Out. It took them somewhere between a year and a year and a half to make this game. They did a really good job of copying the game. They painstakingly studied every single frame of animation so that they could recreate it in their own version, but then reality popped in to give

the two boys their first lesson. Jason's father was a lawyer who specialized in intellectual property law, and he told the boys that copying someone else's game might be a good way to practice programming, but you couldn't actually legally sell it because you'd be infringing on copyright. Now, initially that did not actually stop them from working on the game, but then fate stepped in and forced them to change because while making a backup copy of a working, almost

perfect part of the game, they accidentally erased it. They erased the whole game. See, in those days, we would store these games on floppy disks, external floppy disks. You'd put one in the disk drive. You would save your work to the floppy disk and it would exist there. And apparently what happened was they accidentally copied a blank disc over top of their master disc holding the code for the game, and they erased it. It overwrote the data.

If you listen to my episode about the process of deleting, you know, one to overwrite data on a on a piece of media, it's gone. And that's what happened. They got rid of the source code for their game. And erased all of that work that had taken more than a year to put together, and so the teenagers went back to the drawing board. Their goal was to create

a game that they could potentially sell to someone. So they worked on another game for the Apple two, and they had our working game ready to go in night five. It was an educational title and it was called math Jam, and they had also come up with a name for their company they incorporated in four. Actually that name was JAM Software. Jam was an acronym that stood for Jason and Andy's Magic. They self published this game, math Jam.

That meant at the time that you would create a game, you would put it on a floppy disc, you would make copies onto other floppy disks, you'd throw those copies into ziplock bags, put a cop a photo copy sheet of instructions in the bag with the game, and then you would try and sell it to various customers. Typically it was a computer store, but sometimes it was something else. And because it was educational, they were hoping to see if they could get the game accepted into school curricula

and sell it to school systems. They figured that was a big market, that it was a pretty sure thing. But while they did not count on is that schools have typically a pretty bureaucratic organization with layers of approval that were necessary for any game to be accepted into the school system. And rather than try and navigate that, the two boys decided that they would cut their losses and walk away from math Jam and create something else.

They wanted to regroup and create a different title. Now this time, they wanted to create an original title, something that wasn't a copy of an existing game, and they wanted to just be a game first and foremost not necessarily an educational title, because it would mean that they would work on something that they both loved and there wouldn't be any bureaucratic roadblocks in the way. There's no approval process, or at least there wasn't at the time to get a game that you created out to market

if it was just for a general audience. Now, Ruben had an earlier project he had been working on that he was inspired to create after his family went on a ski trip, and the original title for this project was Ski stud It featured the enlightened plot of a skier who's going down a mountain slope and your job is to get to the bottom and then relax in a hot tub with a couple of really attractive women. That was the concept behind the game, so you know,

teenage fantasy stuff. Gavin suggested that they revisit Ruben's game idea and punch it up. So Gavin took Reuben's original game, which had been programmed in Basic, and he said, this is too slow. The game is not very fun to play because everything's moving at a crawling speed because you've you've programmed it in Basic. So he took the idea and he reprogrammed it in Assembly language, which had the benefit of speeding everything up and making the game feel

more like you know, a game now. Reuben had used a few tools to create the art for this game. One of them was a tool setiment for a totally different type of game. It was called Pinball Construction Set and it was published by Electronic Arts. Ruben used a tablet device to input changes to art, so it was directly connected to his computer and he would try and draw things on this tablet. It was not as precise

as he would like. There was like a three pixel in precision there, so if you're trying to do some fine detail it was very easy for a pixel next to the one you wanted to create to pop up, so there's a lot of racing and trying again, and racing and trying against very slow process. Also, to make it more challenging, there was no native solution to exporting the art to incorporate it into their game because it wasn't meant to be used to create art for other games.

So in order for him to get his art off this tool set and to import it into the game, he would actually have to do a hard reset on his Apple two computer. So in other words, he had to turn his computer off, turn it back on, and then the art he had created would be stored in the cash memory of the computer, so before he could do anything else, he would pull that data off of his machine. Which is a pretty janggie way of creating graphics for your computer game, but it was really one

of the few options that they had. The other tool they were using came from a Michigan based company called Baudeville b a U d V I l l E. That company had a policy which was if you wanted to use their their tools to create a game, you could, but in order to publish that game. You had to get permission from Baudeville, and you had to pay a hundred and fifty dollar licensing fee, essentially, So the two submitted the game their Ski Game to bod Bill, and

Bobyville's response was, hey, nice game. Tell you what, We can publish this game for you, So we'll take over the publishing, which the boys thoughts sound like a great idea. All the hard work of copying the game onto disks and getting that distributed to different stores would be on

the publisher side and not on their shoulders. In return, Bodeville offered jam Software the princely sum of two hundred fifty dollars for the game, plus a two dollar royalty for every copy sold, and they jumped at this opportunity. They were over the moon when the game came out because it was in a box and everything. It was like a real game. And these are two teenagers. Remember they're like fourteen fifteen years old at this point. There are no zip block bags. It was actually a legit product.

The game sold around one thousand, five hundred copies, which is, you know, laughable these days, you would call that a colossal failure in to day's days, day's numbers rather, but Gavin Rubin felt like they had the jackpot. They got two dollars out of every copy sold in fifteen copies meant three grand is fifteen hundred dollars apiece. When you're fourteen or fifteen years old. Fifteen hundred dollars is a

heck of a lot of money. So they were able to actually take that money and reinvested into their company. They bought new computers when they needed them. Uh, and they felt like they were rolling in it. They were like, this is this is real success. What's more, Bodeville was open to publishing more of their games so they could create another one for the same company. Their next title was one called dream Zone. This one would release in n seven, and this was the only other game that

the two made under the company name JAM Software. It was the last one, and this was an adventure game in which the player would control a character who has been trapped within his own dream. The title got some critical praise from early computer gaming magazines and propelled the sales to ten thousand units, which meant the two game developers made about fifteen thousand dollars from their work, not bad at all when you're a teenager. But they weren't

satisfied with stopping there. They were just getting started and they had a big idea that probably should not have worked, but it totally worked. They made a cold call to the front desk of Electronic Arts. Now that means they didn't know anyone at e A. They just called the reception desk and they said, hey, we would like to make games for you, and so e A, for their part, said, tell you what, fed access a couple of your games. Let us see what you've made so far, and we'll

get back to you. So they did. They sent copies of their games to the offices of EA, and then they received a call a little bit later that said, we want you to make games for us. We're ready to sell to to get a contract between us and you. You can make games for us for real money. They were offering a deal that was fifteen thousand dollars plus ten percent of the revenue of the next game they would make, which the two thought wasn't amazingly awesome. My

idea was fantastic. They were gonna guaranteed fifteen grand the amount they had made on their previous game, plus ten percent royalty fees and That's how they hit the big time. But e A did have one condition. The company had to change its name because, as it turns out, there was already another company called Jam Software, so they had to come up with something different, and they began to brainstorm.

Now sadly, the origins of the name Naughty Dog are lost to time, because neither Reuben nor Gavin can remember who came up with the name or why. They do remember that they had essentially twenty four hours to create a new name for their company because e A wanted

that contract signed right away. I wish I could say there was a cool story about a dog eating a floppy disc containing the next game, but we'll just have to accept that at some point during those twenty four hours one of the two of them wrote down Naughty Dog as a possibility, and they decided in the end to go with it, and thus Naughty Dog was officially born. The first game they made for e A was called

Keith the Thief. There's a role playing game that came out for the Apple to gs, the Amiga, and the PC systems. The Apple version in particular got a really nasty review. In fact, it got a do not recommend buying review not because of the game itself, but because e A had put on some copy protection on top of the game that the reviewers felt essentially broke the

experience of trying to play it. Anyone who has dealt with draconian copy protection strategies knows what this is like, where the protection for the game actually impedes your ability to play the game and can sometimes encourage people to seek out pirate id and broken copies of the game, things where people have broken the encryption around the game just so that you can play the game you want

to play. It's one of the reasons why pirates will point to game studios and say they brought this on themselves. I don't think that's necessarily a fair statement. However, I don't blame people for going out and seeking a version of a game that is actually playable. If I bought one of these games and I found that the copy protection was making it impossible to play, I imagine I too would look for a different solution, one that perhaps had already had the copy protection broken. So I totally

get it. And anyway, they encountered this and that really kind of hurt their sales figures. They didn't do too well with Keith the Thief. However, that was just the first game for e A and largely was kind of swept under the rug. Their next one was A Friend Story. Their second game was the most ambitious of theirs to date, and it was also their entry into the world of consoles. So by now we're getting up to nineteen. The two friends were going off to college, and it was two

different colleges in two different states. Jason Rubin would attend the University of Michigan. Andy Gavin got accepted into the

Haverford College in Pennsylvania. They collaborated over the phone and they used dial up modems to send information back and forth, but it was a very slow process and to make matters more challenging, they had picked an ambitious project as their next pitch to e A. Originally was going to be a computer game, a PC game, and it was going to be a complex role playing game called Rings of Power. But they had a meeting over at Electronic Arts and when they were at this meeting, Andy Gavin

looks over and he sees something interesting. He sees this weird shiny box with a whole bunch of wires coming out of it and it was seeming to run a game from a console system, and he asked the people

that e A said, is that A reverse engineered Sega Genesis. Immediately, according to Andy Gavins, some e A officials swept them into an office and said, yeah, we're gonna need you to sign an inn d A, a non disclosure agreement so that you don't tell people that you saw this here, because this is not something that we're ready to talk about yet. So then Gavin says, does this mean we should start developing games for the Sega Genesis? And the guys that e A said, that would be an excellent idea.

The second best idea you could have right now. The best idea you could have right now is to sign the in d A. So they did and only talked about it years and years later when no one really cares. But they decided, well, maybe we should develop Rings of Power for the Genesis, not for the PC, and they

decided to switch gears. It took some time to at the game together since they were living in different states and also had schoolwork to attend to, although Andy Gavin said he was spending maybe two or three hours a day on his schoolwork and the rest of the time he was working on developing games. But in the end they produced a game that was one of the most robust console based RPGs of its time, and it was

largely Andy Gavin's project. It was an idea he was really excited about, and Jason Rubin did a lot of work on it. It's not like he didn't contribute, but it was kind of Andy Gavin's pet project, the one he really wanted to do. It went gold in and it did really well. It sold like a hundred thousand copies. That's not anything to sneeze at, and it had the potential to sell a whole lot more. It was getting great reviews, and then the two hit a problem that

almost made them walk away from developing games entirely. What happened, well, I'll tell you, but first let's take quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So why would Ruben and Gavin leave game development if they were doing such a great job with Rings of Power? What would make them walk away? The issue came down to a lack of control with politics and economics. Sega Genesis games were on cartridges,

so making a cartridge is a hardware manufacturing process. The games are hard coded onto the cartridge itself, so if you contrast that with games on floppy disks or c d s, those are just blank media. You can write to them directly. It doesn't take any special equipment. You're not creating a circuit board, but a cartridge. Essentially that is a circuit board. Then the circuit board, the physical circuit board itself, represents the game. So every cartridge is

unique to the specific game. You can't override a cartridge and put a different game on it. So it takes time and resources to put together cartridges, and that limits how many you can make. It's all based on your capacity of your manufacturing facility. You're physically limited by that fact. Now, if Rings of Power had been the only major game coming out that season, Sega probably could have put more manufacturing power behind it and turned it into a colossal hit.

But there was another game that was coming out at that same time and it was an even bigger sensation. That game was Madden. It was an American football game. Uh, it's part of an incredibly popular franchise that has gone across multiple platforms and spanned decades. So there's an incredible call for Madden Games. There's a guaranteed audience that's going to buy Madden year over year, so that game was pretty much guaranteed to sell out. The company had to

make a choice. Do you go with the game that's essentially guaranteed to sell out, or do you try and push a game that's doing well but doesn't have a built in audience, And they went with the easy money decision.

As any company would, they went with Madden. Ruben and Gavin were discouraged by this decision because they had worked really hard to create what they thought was an extremely good role playing game, and they felt that only a fraction of their potential audience was ever going to get a chance to play it because they literally wouldn't have enough copies of it made to meet the demand. So they were ready to focus on their schoolwork and call

it quits. They had already achieved a great deal of success in the gaming world, so they felt like it wasn't a shame to walk away from it. So any Gavin went and enrolled in graduate school at m i T. He was studying computer science and artificial intelligence. Jason Rubin moved out to California and he had a goal of getting into the special effects industry while picking up a new skill set that would be surfing, and they figured they had retired from making games and that retirement would

last about half a year. In nine they got a phone call from a guy named William Murray Hawkins, the third better known as Trip Hawkins. Now, Ruby and Gavin have described Trip as a phenomenal salesman who has sort of the reality distortion field, similar to what people would

say Steve Jobs was capable of doing. Tripp had founded Electronic Arts way back in nine two, but he had left e A in n to create a new video game console company, and that console company was called three d O. The console itself was coming out in nine and it was at that time the most powerful console on the market. But Hawkins needed developers to create games for this new platform, and he felt that Naughty Dog

was the right studio to create a killer game. Now, despite feeling like they had been burned on their previous title, the two agreed that they would develop a game for the three d Oh system. And one of the reasons that they decided this, you know, they had just been burned by e A, so they didn't really want to do it. But what changed their mind was that Hawkins said, Hey, here's the thing. We're not using cartridges. You're not going

to have a rings of power situation here. We're using compact discs, so we can write information to those discs easily. The manufacturing process is a breeze compared to creating cartridges, so you're never going to run into that situation where a company is going to make one game more than another game because of manufacturing issues. That's just not a problem here. So with that in mind, the two accepted a developer machine for the three D O and they

got to work. Now, developer machines are machines upon which you can program your games tested on there because it will run the hard the software just as the consumer hardware would, but it has more capabilities than a consumer version of the three D O. They looked around and what was popular in arcades, and they saw that fighting games were breaking all the records. Games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were gobbling up quarters left and right.

But the two felt that no one had really nailed it for the home on soul market, and they noticed that no one had signed up to create such a game for the three d OH. There was no Mortal Kombat that was on its way to the three d O, no Street Fighter, so there was opportunity there, and they got to work immediately on a new piece of intellectual property called Way of the Warrior. And if you look at Way of the Warrior, you could immediately say this

was obviously influenced by Mortal Kombat. By influence, I mean you could argue that it's a distant cousin to Mortal Kombat, complete with finishing moves that look a lot like Fatalities, uh, cast of characters that resemble that sort of Mortal Kombat approach, and those characters all had backstories and unique move sets so similar in many ways to Mortal Kombat. Initially, they had no publisher for that game. Ruben and Gavin self funded the development using the money they had earned from

Rings of Power. It took them about a year and a hundred thousand dollars of their own money to make the game. The characters are actually modeled after their friends. A lot of Andy Gavin's classmates are characters in Way of the Warrior. One of his professors, a guy who was a leading expert on robotics, is a character in the game. Another person who became an expert in protein folding and was a candidate for the Nobel Prize is

one of the characters in the game. It's one of the most illustrious fighting rosters I've ever seen, but only if you count the people playing the characters, not the characters themselves. As for the production of the game, they really made the most out of their situation. Andy Gavin was renting an apartment in Boston and Jason Rubin would

go there and work out of that same apartment. They had their friends dress up in ridiculous costumes that were made with whatever stuff they happened to have nearby, including and I am not making this up, hello, cases and containers from fast food restaurants. They made costume pieces out of all of this stuff, and that's what the characters in the game are wearing now. To the credit of

the game. It doesn't look as cheesy as I'm making it sound, but they were really just kind of making all this stuff up as they were going along while trying to build out the game. I think of it as being really kind of cool and dorky at the same time. I totally approve of it. By the way, now they had no publisher, so they had no one

they had to answer to. But eventually they were going to need a publisher because they're going to need someone to take over the production side of actually making and shipping copies of the game. So it's gonna be for the three d O, but they needed to partner with somebody to produce it for the three d O. They ended up attending a trade show and they began to shop their game around. They essentially got an eight ft by eight foot square of the three d O booth

at E three and they demonstrated their game. Now, publishers would come up and ask them, Hey, who's publishing this game, and they said, no one yet, we're actually looking for a publisher. And this was something very different rent from the typical way that things would work at trade shows. Generally, publishers get pitches from established teams that have an idea, but they have not actually started a game, or they certainly haven't finished one, so this was a brand new experience.

They ended up creating something of a bidding war between publishers because here was a game that was fully finished. Publishers didn't have to wonder how it was going to turn out. They could see the game, and they started to you know, court Naughty Dog, saying, hey, come over here, we'll publish the game for you. The winner of that bidding war was the Universal Studios, as in the movie

production company. Universal was deciding they wanted to get into the video game business and they started to acquire smaller companies to create the Universal Interactive brand of computer games, and they gave the two an offer they couldn't refuse. The studio would actually provide office space for Naughty Dog. They would also provide support staff, and all of that would be on Universal's dime. It wouldn't be a charge

to Naughty Dog at all. They would get free studio space in Hollywood, California, on the Universal Studio's lot, right next door to the office of a certain Mr. Steven Spielberg. So they agreed now to take this opportunity. Andy Gavin actually had to drop out of graduate school. He had been working towards his master's degree, and this was not an easy or light decision. His dad was reportedly very much against this idea, but ultimately he figured this was

a way he could chase his dream job. As part of this agreement, the two were signed to create a few games for Universal. Gavin and Ruben would take a cross country road trip from Boston to Hollywood with all of their possessions either in their car or in a

truck that was following along behind the car. Along the way, the two brainstormed ideas for what their next game would be, and they toss around several possibilities, such as another fighting game that would take advantage of the three D capabilities that consoles now could support, because suddenly, with consoles like the three D O and the next generation of consoles, you could incorporate three dimensional aspects into your game when before it was all too D. That opened up a

world of opportunities. But ultimately they decided to put all these other ideas on the back shelf and they started talking about platformers that had traditionally been side scrolling games, games like Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong Country from Nintendo.

They both loved Donkey Kong Country. They loved the art style, they loved the gameplay, and they got to thinking about the possibility of creating that style of game but using the capability of going in three dimensions with it adding real depth to the game, like, what if instead of running left to right, the character was running forward from your perspective or towards you. That suddenly opened up new sabilities for game playing, new challenges, and that got them

really excited. By the time they finally reached California, they knew their next project was going to be a three D based platform er, and they even had a general idea of what the story and setting we're going to be, but that's about all they knew at that point. Now they jokingly referred to the game as Sonics Ass was

named after Sonic the Hedgehog. The reason they called it this is they imagine that the game was going to be where the player controlled the character, where their back was going to be to the player's perspective, so you're always looking at the backside of your protagonist. And it turns out that that side scroller going to a front or back scroller would mean this, and since you'd be looking at the rear end as of this as yet unnamed character, they chose sonics Ass as a quick descriptor.

At this stage, they had no idea what form this character was going to take or what its name might eventually be, but they did have those big ideas, they only knew that they wanted to have a heavily story driven game with lots of cut scenes and plot details

interwoven into the experience. Now, ultimately a lot of their ideas would end up on the cutting room floor, not because they thought they weren't good ideas, but because the consoles they were working on ultimately could not really support that level of detail or that level of memory requirements. So just from a technological standpoint, they had to cut back,

but it was a starting point. Universal was putting an executive team in place to oversee the game development division, which was not just Naughty Dog and included other divisions as well other other former companies that were brought on under a Universal. So Naughty Dog had an executive producer from Universal named Mark Sarney, who was tuned into what

was going on in the business of video games. He was a very smart guy, and he worked very closely with Ruben and Gavin to figure out where the team would go next. Now, as Reuben would relate later on, Way of the Warrior became the last of the garage games produced by Naughty Dog, the last game that just the two of them would work on independently, sort of as a scrappy little company that could to take the next step, they needed to put a team together and

expand beyond this two man operation. It was suddenly too much work for just two people to do on any you know, reasonable time frame. By the time you would produce a game with just two people, the console you're developing for would be out of date. So with Serny, they set out to find a good team. At this point, Ruben and Gavin were twenty four years old and they had never hired anyone before. Their interview process was perhaps,

let's say, a little casual. One of the first employees was a guy Andy Gavin had met in grad school at M I. T. His name was Dave Baggett, and he joined the programming team. Taylor Kurosaki was a universal visual effects artist. He worked in an office a floor below Naughty Dog, and he would visit Naughty Dogs offices frequently. He was big into games and really interested in what they had to do, and he also admired the computers

and software that Naughty Dog had at its access. And they had some of the most cutting edge computers and software available at the time, and he really wanted a chance to work on that type of machinery and that type of software. It was the sort of stuff that was used in ground bake breaking visual effects for movies like Jurassic Park. So eventually Jason Rubin just said, hey, why don't you just come over here and work for us, and then you can use these machines all the time.

He said, okay. They also approached an artist named Bob Rothe, who was being courted by Sega at the time. Rothe was actually looking at several potential job opportunities, but he said that Ruben and Gavin had such a bootstrap approach and a good attitude that he chose to join Naughty Dog rather than what could have been a more lucrative starting position at a different company. They also went on who contract higher two animators, Charles Simbillis and Joe Pearson.

They had worked on major cartoons like an American Tale, you know, the five Old movies. The artists and programmers got to work. They started to figure out what the game would be and who the protagonist should be. Ruben and Gavin had already worked out a lot of those story elements, including thoughts on the setting and the villain, but they still had not yet nailed down what the hero was going to be. Around the same time, Naughty Dog was looking to see which console they'd ultimately developed

the game for. The three d O despite Trip Hawkins work was not taking off. It just wasn't doing well in the market place. It might have been a little bit ahead of its time. The best known variant of the three d O was made by Panasonic, but in fact the console was a platform that could be licensed out to different manufacturing companies, so there were competing versions

of the three d O on the market. You could get a Panasonic three d OH, but there were other companies that were also making licensed three d O consoles, and that maybe confused the marketplace a little bit. It was also an expensive system, and while it predated the PlayStation, it couldn't gain enough traction in the market to be a real contender, despite the fact that clearly was more powerful than other consoles that were out at the same time.

A little bit later, in nineteen ninety six, the three d O would go dark for good, but in Sony was gearing up to become a new leader in the industry and rest control away from Nintendo and to a lesser degree, from Sega. Naughty Dog in Universal turned their attention to this newly emerging console, which would be known as the PlayStation, and Naughty Dog employees got an early look at the console at E three and nine, so they knew which console was going to be home to

their game. Although originally they were hoping to make it a multi platform game and sell it across multiple platforms like consoles and computers, they were eventually convinced to go PlayStation exclusive in exchange for a really good deal with Sony. Ruben and Gavin were determined that whatever character they made would be so compelling that Sony would start to think of it as a mascot for the PlayStation because Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, but without a mascot, the

PlayStation was bound to launch without an iconic character. So they knew they needed a hero. They needed Willie the Wombat. Are you folks out there who know your video games are probably thinking of making a joke, But no, The original character that would have inhabited this transformational Naughty Dog game was called Willie, and he was a wombat. The designers have been flipping through a book about native species of Tasmania, and they had Tasmanian tigers, Tasmanian wolves, Tasmanian

all sorts of things, including bandicoots and wombats. Joe Pearson created the initial design of Willie, who looked kind of like a weasel wearing a bandit mask. Pearson described the character as zoro like. The model wasn't that different from what the ultimate character who spoiler alert is crash Bandicoot would look like, but with a ninja mask on rather

than an uncovered head. Charles Zimbella's took that lanky design that Pearson and created and gave him sort of a hunched over, somewhat manic approach, animating him in a way that made him look a little crazy. The combination created an unusual effect that hadn't really been done in video games. It felt right and a little weird. But something else that the team felt was weird was the name, or

rather they felt it wasn't weird or memorable enough. Now there's some memory based confusion over who came up with the whole thing, but Karasaki said later that he was pretty sure that he and Dave Baggett came up with the name Crash, So there may have even been a brief moment where the character would have been Crash Wombat. That obviously didn't stick, and so they ultimately decided to change the character species as well as his name, and

that's when we got Crash Bandicoot. Now, I've got a lot more to say about the development of Crash Bandicoot, but before I go on, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor. Well. Pearson and Zimbellis were important in the creation of the world and the characters for Crash Bandicoot. They were worked for higher employees. They were

not official members of the Naughty Dog team. They also would later lament their deal that they made, stating that they agreed to do the work for far less money than what it was worth. But they also say that's on us. We agreed to the terms, but we should have really tried to negotiate for a better deal. After this early development of character design, Naughty Dog braun a few more employees to join their team. They included a

sound engineer named Dan call Morgan. He left a steady gig at a company called Laser Graphics in order to join the Naughty Dog team. They also hired Charlotte Francis, who came from the movie industry. She joined the team as the seventh member of Naughty Dog and the first woman employee of the company. She became a texture artist

for the game, and that it didn't stop there. They actually added one more person, a guy named Justin Monast who had applied to work at Universal Interactive as an associate producer for Mark Sarney, the executive producer that worked with Naughty Dog. He did not land that gig, but while he was applying, he found out that Naughty Dog was seeking an I T professional to join their team, and he decided to apply for that and he was

hired on. Meanwhile, they also had to line up Sony as their customer to get this exclusive relationship going, so they put together a demo reel of the work they had done on the game so far to make a real kind of sizzle reel for Sony executives. Karasaki was actually able to secure some of the editing bays a Universal's lot to make it look really slick, so this

was a a full fledged production here. They got the tape to Sony executives, who immediately saw the appeal of this style of game, and E three was coming up, and Sony needed a character that could be an iconic representation of the brand, and that's how Crash Banditoo Bandicoot became the unofficial mascot for the PlayStation. Sony would end up doing a big pr campaign in which a person

would actually dress up as Crash Bandicoot. Really more like a person inside a Crash Bandicoot mascot outfit, because you could see the guy's face inside Crash, his mouth and everything. He would stand outside of places like Nintendo US headquarters and he would hold a bullhorn and he would heckle the company. Sony was leveraging this irreverent attitude of the character to create buzz for the Sony PlayStation. So Crash was a video game character with attitude, not some cartoonish

figure for little kids. And I'm saying that in a little bit of a tongue in cheek way. Kind of reminds me of a Pucci from The Simpsons. He's a dog with attitude. Well, Crash Bandicoot had an interesting approach to game level design and had a limited three D implementation. It was on rails, which meant the segments where he controlled Crash where he was either running away from you or running toward you. Were set. You could not just run freely. You had to either run forward toward the

camera or away from the camera. You could not wander out into a fully three dimensional world. Now you contrast that was something like Super Mario sixty four, which debuted at the same E three that Crash Bandicoot first made his public appearance, and you see that there's a big difference there. In Mario sixty four, you can control your character and run freely through all the environments, but this

creates a very different type of game experience. So Naughty Dog had this real philosophical debate early on in the process. They were concerned that if they did not keep the game on rails, the amount of work they would need to complete the game would be too much for the small team that they had in place, and they wouldn't be able to deliver a good aiming experience, so it

would be a failure on all accounts. So they chose to put some restrictions in place to help guide not only the player through the course of the game, but the actual process of game development itself. The team learned a lot from this experience. They had to do much of their work as pioneers, and that included level design. Kurasaki would later say one of his biggest regrets was

how difficult the game turned out to be. He said that he made the levels way too hard in that first Crash game, pushing the difficulty up further with every level. He would amend that in the sequels to the game. Another thing they learned was how to work within the constrictions of the platform they were designing for. So the PlayStation was capable of supporting a game containing about three thousand polygons, individual little shapes out of which you would

create larger figures. So Crash was made up of about five thirty two polygons. Everything on the screen was created with polygons, so it became important to be as conservative as possible. That's why they decided to create crates in Crash. They needed to have some sort of interactive element in the environment to make the game more fun. They found that the game without the crates just wasn't quite having the impact they wanted, so they had to come up

with something. Well, that's one of the simplest polygonal shapes you can make. It's also why many of the creatures in the original game are relatively simple or primitive in design. Now,

much of the development went relatively quickly. Andy Gavin described the process of implementing those crates in the game as being particularly fun and easy, with most of the functionality created with just one or two days of work, which is phenomenal to think about how something so central to the gameplay of the whole title series just came about

in forty eight hours. The crates created a new aspect of the game, allowing them to create puzzles within levels, So according to Dave Baggett, it was this development that turned the game from functional three D platform or into something that was legitimately fun to play. One challenge they overcame presented itself with a secondary problem they did not anticipate.

So the PlayStation had about two megs of RAM, but Andy Gavin had to come up with a way to make levels much larger than what that amount of memory would allow, and the way he did it was he would have the console reference the c D more frequently. Usually a PlayStation would just load whatever information was needed for a level before referencing the c D again, so it would spin up the c D, pull the data and then stop and just allow the player to play the game till the CD needed to spin up again.

That meant all the levels had to be relatively small or not take up too much memory. Gavin had created a system in which the console would frequently reference the c D, reading it so that it could load in the images for the levels throughout gameplay, over and over. But there in lines a problem. Kelly Flock, and executive with Sony, pointed out that here's the issue. The PlayStation was rated for four hundred thousand reads. That meant the console was not intended to spin a c D so

many times over the course of one game. Mechanical parts you see we'll wear out over time, and when designing the console, Sony had determined that four hundred thousand reads four hundred thousand times that this CD ROM would spin a c D was a decent number to shoot for

before a system might fail from whear and tear. But with Crash Bandicoot, the system would engage the CD drive far more frequently throughout play, to the point that Andy Gavin estimated the average gamer would hit four hundred thousand reads within about three weeks and Sony was not crazy about a game that could potentially break their console after just three weeks of play, As the game neared completion, Naughty Dog signed a contract with Josh Mansell and mark

Mother's Ball. Mother's Ball, by the way, was in one of my favorite bands from the nineteen eighties. It's called Devo, and if you're not familiar with them, you need to listen to Are We Not Men? We Are Devo? That's their first album. Anyway, they came on board to create the video game's musical score, and voice actor Brendan O'Brien came on board to become the voice for Crash Bandicoot,

as well as Dr Neo Cortex and a few other characters. Meanwhile, they discovered, to their great success, that the estimates that have been made on how many times the PlayStation could reference the CD ROM was way on the conservative side. So their game did stress the console beyond what Sony intended, but there didn't seem to be any sort of outbreak of console failures across the customer base. If there had been, the story of Naughty Dog might have ended at this

first big game. Well. The team had been working long hours to get the game finished fixing hundreds of bugs day after day play testing the game extensively. According to interviews, their average days would last sixteen to eighteen hours at the office with no days off including holidays. So it was a really tough, grueling schedule, but the small team was determined to create a really good game. They launched it on September nine, and it received positive reviews for

its graphics and level and character design. Some pointed out that the difficulty was being a little bit of a barrier, so kind of what others had already said about the level design. It would go on to become one of the best selling PlayStation titles of all time, with more than six and a half million units sold. It spent a couple of years on the Top twenty games chart for PlayStation games before it finally dropped off in Crash Bandicoot spun off two direct sequels as well as a

racing game. The development grew with every single game, and they would add on more and more employees over at Naughty Dog every single year. I'll talk a little bit more about that in Part two of this series, as well as how Naughty Dog ventured into uncharted territory and how the company dealt with a massive shakedown as the two founders stepped down while sell the company off to Sony. All of that and more will be covered in Part two,

so be sure to check that out when it goes live. Meanwhile, if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, I welcome you to get in contact with me and let me know what those suggestions are. You can send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech

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