The Naughty Dog Story Part Two

sneak in and create a de facto mascot for the company. Now, due to the complicated intellectual property ownership status, Crash would never become an official mascot of PlayStation, partly because Universal Studios had a stake in the property. Universal Studios had made a deal with Naughty Dog a few years earlier to develop three games together, and Crash Bandicoot was the

first of those three. But there's no question that Sony was able to take advantage of crashes innovative gameplay design and the you know, no nonsense attitude that the little creator gave off in promotional materials. Actually it was more like all nonsense, all the time attitude. It was nineties attitude, which is probably the most irritating attitude ever. I lived through it. I know what I'm talking about. Well. In the thirtieth anniversary documentary that was based on Naughty Dog

is a great documentary. It's available on YouTube. I I highly recommend checking it out. Andy Gavin said that the success of Crash Bandicoot exceeded their expectations, even though everything went quote exactly as according to plan end quote. So in other words, the team had set out to make a successful game with a protagonist that gamers would connect with, but they didn't expect it to take off the way it did. The development process had been a grueling one.

If you listen to the last episode, you know about that. Most of the folks on staff were young and single, and so they spent long hours in the office, sometimes not even going home in order to get the game to ship on time. And people worked every single day of the week, including holidays. It was already time for them to get back to work on Crash two though, for the next project, so they couldn't really take any time to appreciate what they had done. According to Jason Rubin,

one of the two co founders of the company. He worked three hundred sixty four days in He only missed one day that whole year, and that was because he had a cold so bad he could not come into work. He said he believed that Andy Gavin, his fellow co founder, had actually worked every single day that year for an

average of sixteen hours a day. That would remain true throughout the process of creating all three of the Crash Bandicoo games, and that took its toll on both of the founders, not to mention everybody else in the company. The two sequels are called Crash Bandicoot to Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot Warped. According to the founders, the team went from one crunch time on producing a game directly into the other, and then into another. It was

an exhausting slog to get through everything. They also hired on more people to join the team, so each game took a little less time but more people to complete. The business of developing games was going through an evolution at this stage. So in the early days of computer games, you could be a generalist, or perhaps you could specialize in one very large general area such as game engine development or game art and That's exactly how Andy Gavin

and Jason Rubin had been working together. Gavin did all the major programming and Reuben did all the art in their early games. But at this point, game development was starting to get more complicated and required people with narrower but hyper developed set of skills, so things like lighting and shading stuff that took very specific abilities. You couldn't just be an artist and do it all. You really had to have people who focused just on one aspect

of the game. With each Crash Bandicoot game, the development team grew. Crash three marked the final game produced through this partnership between Naughty Dog and Universal Studios. Now they had initially agreed to produce those three games as part of the deal, and that number had now been reached

and the relationship had actually soured quite a bit over time. Initially, Universal had provided the resources that Naughty Dog needed to develop games on a larger scale than what they had been doing, which was that two man operation of Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin. But by Crash three, things have changed significantly. According to Jason Rubin, Universal's part in Naughty Dog's operations had dwindled to almost nothing when it came to day to day operations, Sony was providing the money

for development and production of titles. The team at Naughty Dog was doing all the work, and even their executive producer Mark Sarney, who had originally worked with Universal Studios, had left Universal and now was working with Naughty Dog as an independent contractor. So Reuben said that Universal wasn't really doing anything at all except cashing checks because they owned the intellectual property of Crash Bandicoot. This rubbed Ruben

and many others at Naughty Dog the wrong way. They said, why should the developers split so much of their money with a company that's not really doing anything to provide

for the success of our titles. Jason Ruben said in an interview with Games Industry Dot biz that he and Andy had decided not to renew the agreement with Universal Interactive while the team was still working on Crash three, so they hadn't even finished, uh delivering the game that would conclude the agreement when they had said, you know what,

we're not gonna do this again. He said they were unwilling to split that revenue with Universal, and he also said that the it was it was just getting really hard to deal with people at Universal is increasingly difficult to work with executives there, and they were making it a habit of taking credit for success of the Crash Bandicoot series, even though no one at Universal had really had a role to play in the later development of

those games. According to Reuben, he and his team were moved into temporary spaces in the hallways at Universal Studios as offices. They couldn't be turned out in the street because the deal that Naughty Dog had signed with Universal guaranteed them work space in return for developing the three Crash Bandicoot games, But Ruben said the folks at Universal made sure that things were not easy or pleasant for Naughty Dog once it was clear they weren't going to

renew their arrangement. Reuben said they even had to Jerry Riggan air conditioner for their servers because Universal would turn off the A C in the evenings. Their workspace was on the thirty fourth floor of a building and they were told they could not bring in portable A C units into the hall. They were concerned not just for their own for it, but for their servers that were getting up to a hundred thirty degrees fahrenheit so they

decided they would do their best. They rigged up a bucket of ice and a fan, a regular oscillating fan to blow air over the ice and cool their servers down so that they didn't go critical. Eventually, they were able to sneak in a portable a C unit up to their space, disguised as a small refrigerator. The day the team handed off Crash three, they left the Universal lot. They did not waste time. They relocated to a new headquarters in Santa Monica, California, and they got to work

on a cart racing game. Jason Rubin said that the initial thought was games were going to become more cinematic, They were going to incorporate live action sequences, and they were going to require the talents cultivated by the film

industry in particular. Full motion video was still a thing at this point and had not quite become the joke many people associate with it these days, and so they chose to stay close to Los Angeles, thinking they would be really close to all of those assets, rather than relocate to a place like San Francisco or Austin, Texas. Now, according to Ruben, that decision ended up having advantages and disadvantages.

The big disadvantage was that these other cities, you know, San Francisco in Austin in particular, had a lot more game development studios in them, and it was a lot easier to attract talent to a studio because there was already a culture there. Los Angeles didn't have that many game development studios, so it was harder to attract talent. But by being a big player in a town that did not have many game development studios, Naughty Dog could

more easily hold onto the talent it cultivated. So once they got someone, they weren't likely to easily leave the company. There there wasn't the likelihood of another company coming in and sniping out an employee out from under Naughty Dog because they weren't in the same town. Naughty Dog then reached out to Sony and said, hey, we have a game we're working on. It's right now, a bunch of

nondescriptive people on these go kart like racers. But we'd really love to make this a crash bandicoot racing game. Only there's a problem. See, we are not all We're not gonna talk to anyone over at Universal. We kind of hate their guts and they kind of hate our guts and we don't want to deal with that. So, because Universal owns the intellectual property for crash Bandicoot, if we want to make this a crash Bandicoot game, could you guys over at Sony go to Universal and work

things out for us? And Sony said sure, and they jumped in and they negotiated the rights to use Crash Bandicoots intellectual property and create this racing cart game, Crash Team Racing. So that was Naughty Dog's first post Universal game, the Crash Bandicoot Crash Team Racing cart game for the PlayStation,

which came out in now. As most of the team focused on building out Crash Team Racing, Andy Gavin began to work with Stephen White and Mark Sarney to plan for a new game engine to run on top of the next generation of Sony hardware. The PlayStation two was poised to come out in the spring of two thousand and Gavin wanted to make sure that Naughty Dog was ready to transition to develop games for this new hardware.

They also wanted to create an all new intellectual property title that would be under the control of Naughty Dog itself. So while they were no longer a small, scrappy independent developer the way they had been in the eighties and early nineties, they were determined to chart their course as if they still were a very small team. The intellectual property would turn into a series of games featuring a pair of protagonists named Jack and Daxter. As for Crash,

that i P would remain with Universal. Eventually, the Vendi Universal, which evolved from Universal Interactive, would merge with another company, that being Activision, and the rights to Crash Bandicoot ultimately would pass to this new merged company. There have been twenty games to feature Crash Bandicoot as either the main protagonist or a playable character. Only four out the twenty

were actually developed by Naughty Dog Game Studio. The goal Naughty Dog had with Jack and Daxter wasn't just to make a new franchise. It was to push their approach to game development and try to incorporate more story and

plot into an adventure game. That had been the original intent for Crash Bandicoot, but the team found out while they were developing it for the PlayStation that the limitations of that console made it impractical, if not impossible, to develop such an ambitious style of game, so they had high hopes that the PlayStation two would be up to snuff.

The company also took it on faith that they would works out, you know, a publishing deal with Sony somewhere down the line, so they were concentrating on building Jack and Daxter and left all that contract stuff for later. So I actually started building a game before there was any ink signed to have that game published, which is sort of a repeat of how Gavin and Rubin had

made Way of the Warrior a few years earlier. That was the game that got them the initial deal with Universal, and Naughty Dog was making decent money from Crash bandicoot royalties, so there weren't as many economic pressures in play as there could have been. At this stage, Jason Reuben instituted a new rule at naughty Dog. Development had reached a point where multiple people would be working on the same assets, so you would have multiple people creating a single character,

for example. But naughty Dogs policy up to this point was to allow people to kind of come in at different times things that were suitable to their own schedules. So some folks would pull a twelve hour day starting from six am, going to six pm. Others were still pulling a twelve hour day, but they started four pm and they clock out it four am. Now, Ruben saw

this as a problem. It meant that people who were handling the same assets in the game had very little time to actually work together because some of them would come in two hours before the other person was leaving. It really limited any sort of collaboration, so he created a policy in which all Naughty Dog employees were required to be at the company for several core hours. The reaction from employees was less than enthusiastic. In fact, two

team members left after those changes took effect. However, they would eventually become industry standards across the video game world. Ruben and Gavin had also noted the effect of all that work was taking its toll on their employees. People had families now, so they weren't as eager to spend day after day working eighteen hours at the office, and they were getting tired, and so they created another new policy. At the end of every project, everyone would get a

month vacation. Effectively, the company would shut down for a full month and then as soon as you got back, you have to go right back into work. On the next project. However, this policy did not cover the co founders Reuben and Gavin, because they would continue holding meetings and giving interviews during that month hiatus. In other words,

they didn't stop working. Back to Jack and Dexter, Naughty Dog wanted an action adventure game in which as much of the story could be incorporated directly into the game as possible. They also wanted a large, open world environment without having any long loading times between zones, so that you could walk from one side to the other and

you would never have an annoying loading screen. In the end, they were able to create cut scenes to insert into the action and advance the story, but they found it difficult to integrate plot and action more seamlessly. It was a step beyond what crash Bandicoot could do, but it was still far short of what their end goal was now.

The title characters are Jack, which is kind of a young and an elf like creature who serves as the playable character for the first game, and Daxter, who used to be another young elf like creature but then got turned into a critter called an otsul, part otter, part weasel, and he's often the comic relief in the games Jack and Daxter, the precursor Legacy, launched in two thousand one. The following year, two thousand two, Andy Gavin and Jason

Rubin made a big decision. They decided that they were going to sell the company to Sony and that they would retire from their leadership roles. I'll talk more about that decision in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The co founder's decision to retire didn't exactly come out of the blue.

Jason Rubin has said that he and Andy Gavin were at a nightclub in Tokyo with a couple of other people, including Kelly Flock, and Kelly was the head of Sony's game division in the United States at the time, and Flock had said that Naughty Dog was effectively at the top of the video game business, which sadly meant it had nowhere to go but down, and that just meant that there was no way to climb higher than the top. When you're at the top, that's where you can be.

You can try and stay on the top as long as you can, but eventually you're gonna go down if things don't, you know, consistently evolved, and Garrety Rubin began to give thought to selling the company because the idea of having to keep reinventing the company over and over in order to maintain that top spot when they hadn't had a vacation in years seemed a little too overwhelming. But even then, when they started thinking about the possibility

of selling the company, it didn't happen right away. When the first Jack and Daxter game went live, the whole company went on vacation except for the two co founders, who continued to work, but the grind really was getting to them. The company was nervous about how their new game was going to be received, because really they had been known for Crash Bandicoot at this point would they

actually find acceptance with Jack and Daxter. Fortunately, the game got good reviews and sales were doing quite well, so when everyone came back a month later, they immediately launched into developing the sequel to Jack and Daxter, conveniently titled Jack two. By two thousand two, Gavin and Rubin had decided it was a good time to change things up. They wanted to sell the company. They were going to

sell it to Sony. It would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Entertainment, and then they were going to step away from the company. But they didn't plan to just abandon Naughty Dog with no warnings, so instead they drew up a two year transition plan in which they would both gradually handoff duties and responsibilities to their chosen successors, and at the end of that in two thousand four, they would complete the handoff and then they could go

and right off into the sunset, virtually speaking. Now, a lot changed between those first two Jack and Dexter games. The second game had a more serious tone and a different approach to navigating the world and progressing through the story. Behind the scenes, people at Naughty Dog weren't really sure what the future would bring. There were some worries about how the transition with Ruben and Gavin stepping away, how that could affect work, not to mention how an acquisition

could change things. Would the company be able to maintain its philosophy and work culture, or which things changed so dramatically when Sony took charge that it wouldn't even be the same company anymore. That two year plan helped settle fears quite a bit. Ruben and Gavin began grooming Evan Wells and Stephen White to take over the leadership positions

at Naughty Dog. They would effectively be co presidents. Gradually, Ruben and Gavin stepped back from their roles, with Wells and White taking on more of those responsibilities as time went on. This would often be cited as one of the more successful executive transitions in any industry, let alone in the video game industry. Eventually, Evan Wells and Stephen White would become co presidents of the company, and Andy Gavin and Jason Jason Rubin left Naughty Dog in October

two thousand four. That was the same year that Jack three came out. Stephen White would end up leaving the company a few years later, and a programmer named Christoph Blestra took over as the new co president alongside Evan Wells. At that point. That was around two thousand seven. Jumping back just a bit. While much of the team transitioned to work on a racing title for Jack and Daxter that would come out in two thousand five, another early

project began to take form. They had a creative writer on staff named Amy Hennig who had joined naughty Dog after working in the video games industry since nineteen nine, so she had had more than a decade's worth of experience in the world already, and she had a concept for a new game that she felt would be a

good fit for the next generation of consoles. The PlayStation three was not set to launch until November two thousand six, but Hennig believed that Naughty Dog needed to start to focus on something that could be a defining game for that new console. Hennig started by striking off things on the list she did not want to make. She did not want to go with a dark, gritty, first person style games set in a post apocalyptic world. She said

there were already other games that were doing that. She didn't want the game to be super serious, but she also did not want to create a game that was cartoonish that featured animated characters jumping all around the screen, and considering that Jack and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot kind of fell into that category, this would mean a big

departure for naughty Dog. What she wanted to do was create a game that had realistic graphics, compelling animation, really great acting, both from the voice over actors, and from the in game characters themselves and great action sequences, and it also just had to be fun to play, not dour and depressing. The closest analog to what she had in mind was tomb Raider, but at that time the tomb Raider franchise had sort of faded into the background.

Hinnigg's project had a code name, Project Big. It wasn't called anything particular because they were still deciding what it was going to be. It turned out that Project Big was a bit of an understatement. Not only had Hennig and her team not yet figured out what form it was going to take, they were also going to have to program a game for an all new console that had a drastically different microchip architecture. The PlayStation three had a lot of power at its disposal, but it also

was not designed like earlier iterations of the PlayStation. Developers, not just Naughty Dog developers, but throughout the entire industry found it challenging to build games for this new console. At first, Naughty Dog was not alone in this. It was all uncharted territory. And yeah, I made that same joke in the last episode, but I'm making it again now because Project Big would of course, evolve into the

hit game series Uncharted. One of the earliest ideas they played with was to create a game set in an underwater complex with underwater mechanics and physics and all sorts of cool ideas, but ultimately they felt like this setting wasn't really in line with what the company did best.

They thought going with something that was so clustrophobic probably wasn't going to end up being fun, so they decided to explore other ideas, and later on they were really thankful that they changed direction because when Bioshot came out, they realized that that game was really incredible and probably better than what they would have done given a similar setting, so they were kind of glad they had decided not to go down that route, even though they had developed

a lot of assets, art and other assets for such a game. Uh Naughty Dog was instead going to explore or other options for a project Big. So another idea they looked at was to set the game in the future and they would have a protagonist essentially what would turn into Nathan Drake, the protagonist of the Uncharted series, who is part treasure hunter, part archaeologist, kind of an Indiana Jones style character, although more on the treasure hunter

side than the person wanting to preserve everything side. They thought, well, in this version, Nathan Drake is going to be in the future and he's searching for relics of the past, which would actually be stuff from our present day. So, in other words, it would take place in sort of a post apocalyptic world. But again, this didn't seem like it was going to be a good fit, and even though they did develop some ideas around this, they never pushed it to the point where it would become part

of the Uncharted series. More changes and experiments followed. Maybe it would be a game with lots of high tech gadgets and weaponry. Maybe it would take place in a steampunk world with flying cars. Maybe it would involve super spies and double crosses. Now gradually it evolved into a pulp adventure kind of story based game. One of the big goals was to finally achieve what Naughty Dog had been trying to do for years, incorporating action sequences and

story sequences together effectively. The goal was to create playable cut scenes. Naughty Dog wanted the gameplay to look just as good as other games. Unplayable cut scenes had turned out to be that would be too much for Uncharted one, but it would be something they would strive for again and Uncharted two. The story for Uncharted one took a really long time to coalesce, and it went through a ton of different changes. The development process for the engine, likewise,

took an extremely long time. Sony, the parent company, allowed Naughty Dog to operate as if it were truly independent, so no Sony executives were knocking on the door and asking to see pitches or concepts. They didn't demand to sign off on story elements or game assets. There was a level of trust the company put in the team, which both gave the developers freedom and added to their

sense of responsibility to deliver a really compelling experience. The protagonist of the game series, Nathan Drake, is sort of like Hans Solo and Indiana Jones combined into a treasure hunting scalawag. So Harrison Ford on his best days as a young man, he wasn't dressed in a particularly distinct way. He had a dirty T shirt and jeans that was his to go outfit, and in fact, most people felt that this put the game a disadvantage because how do you market a hero who just looks like a normal guy.

It was a challenging concept to put forward as an iconic character, but Naughty Dog kept on going and working on the story and the game engine, and as it turns out, this design, while simple, was necessary because it meant less stuff for the team to have to animate to bring to life. When the game finally came together, this turned to be a nightmare of a project. Blestro would later respond to the question what was hard about

making Uncharted, and his answer was everything. The decision to make the game cinematic meant the company had to developed new animation tools and styles while working on unfamiliar hardware. Now Cerny said that it took Naughty Dog about six months to get up to speed for the PlayStation two, but it took more than a year to get up to speed with PlayStation three, and even then there really

wasn't a full mastery of the hardware. They had a rough build of some gameplay mechanics, and not everything was working properly. It was a far cry from a playable game, and it was really tough work, and for some people at Naughty Dog it was truly demoralizing. It didn't help that the needs of this game were well outside the

comfort zone of the established teams at Naughty Dog. The animators there were used to more hand drawn styles and approaches, but that technique was not going to work if they wanted to have realistic motion and effects in Uncharted. The company made the decision that they were going to experiment with motion capture, which was met with some resistance from the animation department. It was totally new and they were

worried about getting replaced. What's more, no one was really familiar with the technology, so the company actually had to hire people familiar with that tech to come in and figure out how to take the data that it generated from motion capture and make it usable within a game. As time went on, it became clear that the strategies the team was using just we're not working, and so they made the tough call to scrap everything and start

over developing new tools. But that meant all the people whose work depended upon the tools couldn't actually do anything, so artists and animators and others were left with nothing to do. As programmers tried to build this new set of tools, there was very real danger that Uncharted could turn into vapor were akin to Duke Nukem Forever. There were even people who were saying this might be the

end for naughty Dog. Several people weren't content to wait around to see if the ship was ever going to right itself, and a few were concerned about the new direction of the company. Uh They thought that a realistic game, even one meant to be funny and charming, was a huge departure from the more cartoonish platformers and action adventure games that they had built their reputation upon, and that no one would accept a new style of game from

the studio. There were also people in the company who felt that Uncharted was very much not a Naughty Dog style of game at all, and so for the first time in the company's history, more people were leaving then the company was hiring on a month to month basis. Naughty Dog was actually getting smaller. Those who remained with the company began to double down on their conviction that they could put out a game that they had envisioned.

They worked hard to get those tools in place, and then to put the tools to use in constructing a game. They also let go of the notion that the company had to develop all the tools itself as a result of the pains that they went through during the development of Uncharted one, so for Uncharted two they ended up paying a license for the Havoc game engine that's published by an Irish software development company. This was a difficult time for Naughty Dog, but the game was slowly coming

together despite all those setbacks. The team created a demo for the two thousand and six E three conference. It was all built on PC because at that stage the studio didn't have any PlayStation three developer kits on the studio floor itself, they only had access to one developer kit. Taylor Kurasaki told I g N that that one PS three developer kit they had access to was the size

of a refrigerator. At the time, there were a limited number of PS three developer kits available in the world, and because Uncharted was not scheduled to be a launch title, it made more sense to save those kits for developers who were working on games that were meant to be playable on the PlayStation three launch day. The demo over at E three went over really well, but what didn't go over so well was sporting the game to PS three.

Once they finally got access to those developer kits, it became clear that not all the functionality they had put into the game was going to make it to the final title because the PS three just was not able to handle it. It It was going to require too much changes in code, and in fact, later on developers would say that if you were to look at the code for Uncharted, you would just see a massive mess that was practically incomprehensible. The game did come out just before

Thanksgiving in two thousand seven. That same year, Christoph Bilester became the new co president of the company along with Evan Wells, and Uncharted had undergone some last minute changes

at the two thousand seven E three. The build they showed off featured an auto aim function similar to what was found in Tomb Reader games, but the team decided that that wasn't really a fun mechanic for their game, so they switched it to a cover based system in which you'd guide Nathan Drake from one bit of cover to another while returning fire on enemies. It did well, but the company was eager to give it another go.

They didn't win the awards they were hoping to win, and a lot of the stuff they wanted to put into Uncharted they couldn't because they had spent so much time just getting those tools fixed and learning how the PlayStation three would actually work. The development process for Uncharted one had spanned three years, but less than a year of that was actually spent on the real guts of the game. Everything else was just getting the foundation in place.

Now that they had done that, the team was eager to go back to the drawing board and create a sequel, so work started an Uncharted two. Now, this time they really wanted to push themselves. They wanted a huge action sequence that looked like a cut scene but was really a playable moment in the game, and they quickly settled on an idea that appealed to the entire team. It

was a cool action sequence involving a moving train. It become the big opener for Uncharted two, and it also became one of the hallmark moments in Naughty Dog games as a whole. One thing the studio decided to do is change how they captured performances and Uncharted they had an actor playing a character for the purposes of motion capture. Then they would have an actor, sometimes not even the same one do the voiceover, but for Uncharted two, they

wanted to go a step further to performance capture. They wanted the same actor to produce the movements and voiceover for cut scenes. During the same shoot, actors would perform their roles as if they were in a film or a play. They would move, they would emote, they would speak in real time, with those performances making their way into the final build of the game, and this became the approach Naughty Dog would use for its next several titles.

The developers were still tweaking nearly every element of the game itself, from AI to the physics of the world to the way you could fight off enemy, and they were using the Havoc game engine as a foundation. But the groundwork for the characters had already been done, so that helped a lot. Uncharted had already established who these characters were, so they just were able to flesh that out.

More So, while Uncharted two was still a big effort, it wasn't marked with the same turmoil as its predecessor. What's more, when it did come out in two thousand nine, it won awards like a lot of them, like almost all of them. Everyone and Naughty Dog was relieved and more than a little surprise at how well received the game was. They've been hoping for a hit, and it

turned out. The game resonated with critics and players. It became one of the most popular exclusive titles for the PlayStation three, and of course, as soon as the game came out, Naughty Dog began to look at what to do next, and this time it would try doing two big projects simultaneously. What were they, Well, I'll tell you, but only after we take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So decisions at the highest levels, including at Sony itself, had led to Naughty Dog taking a different

tactic post Uncharted two. First, there was an Uncharted three team. No big surprise there, Uncharted had done well, Uncharted two was already getting buzz so clearly they were already going to start on a sequel, and they put the same leaders in place who were going to oversee the development to Nathan Drake's next adventure. They had a pretty heavy burden to carry because Uncharted two had really raised expectations significantly.

Now at the same time, they formed a second team that would share the same resources available to the Uncharted three projects. So if you think of the whole company as a talent pool. That talent pool was being shared

between two major projects at the same time. The second team was led by Bruce stray Ley and Neil Druckman, and they had taken some ideas that had been pitched for the Uncharted series before it finally kind of coalesced into that pulp action adventure game, and they talked about setting their game in a post apocalyptic world, one that had been affected by a terrible catastrophe, and most of the story of the game would take place well after

that catastrophe, and you'd have these overgrown cities. So a lot of ideas that were going to go into an early build of Uncharted but never went past kind of that brainstorming phase or the initial asset phase. Now, over time they decided that they had to define what is this catastrophe, what is it that caused this post apocalyptic world, And they decided upon a fungus that infects humans and

turns them into crazed cannibals. So this is kind of a variation on the zombie motif, only these humans have become hosts to a parasite rather than turned two undead creatures. The game's name eventually became the Last of Us. Both Uncharted three, Drake's Deception and The Last of Us would

use people from that same pool of talent. On the development side, some people were committed to one game more than the other, but during various stages of development, everyone was expected to lend a hand to one or the other of the titles, depending upon whichever one needed it most. At that time. Uncharted three would build Uncharted two, including fleshing out the multiplayer aspect that two had introduced, but upon its launch it would receive, let's be nice, slightly

less praise than the second Uncharted game had earned. Some outlets still said it was an amazing game. Someone gave it a perfect score, but others felt like it wasn't quite a worthy successor for Uncharted two. Folks at Naughty Dogs seemed to feel the game was a good one, but perhaps not as great as the second one. It wasn't a game to be ashamed of by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that when a game comes out and wins all the awards, expectations can reach unrealistic levels.

So Uncharted three came out in two thousand eleven at that time, the Last of Us was still in development. That process had also been really slow because they weren't really sure how to make the game. Should it be super narrative heavy, How do you balance out the gameplay versus the story. How much story should there be? What perspective should the game take? But there was a sequence and uncharted two that kind of acted as a guide.

In that sequence, Nathan Drake works with another character in an area, and that the whole experience created a really interesting dynamic. It transformed the game from a purely solo effort to something more akin to a cooperative experience, even

though one of the characters is controlled by AI. They decide the Last of Us would be similar, and they decided to create an older male protagonist as the controllable character and create a young female protagonist as the secondary AI character, and then create a relationship between these two. They started working on creating the story beats that would take this shape and become the Last of Us and make it a really impactful experience now here and how

stuff works. The Last of Us is often brought up as an example of a phenomenal game that elevates the genre. There's a frequent debate in the game sphere and beyond about whether or not video games should count as art. Now. I don't plan on going into that debate here, but I will say that if you think that video games are art, the Last of Us has to be one of the games that qualifies as that distinction. My coworker

Joe McCormick feels very much the same way. We would spend ages talking about the story yell months of the Last of Us, the pacing of the game, and how we found it to be a really appealing experience. And I'm being a bit vague about the details here because some of you may not have yet played this or watched a playthrough of Last of Us. I highly recommend checking it out. If you're not a gamer, you may want to see if there's a good play through to watch,

because I think it's quite well done. It's a really good story. The Last of Us was a mature title, the first mature title for Naughty Dog, and had a much more gritty and dark world than the previous Naughty Dog games. It was also less playful and less funny than previous titles, which meant it was very different and we know about different things. People don't like different things. Specifically the development team, there were people at naughty Dog

who resisted this whole idea. They felt that it was so totally different from the previous games from naughty Dog that again, it may not have been a naughty Dog tame. But ultimately, as this game began to take shape, the team won over most of the other employees, convincing them that no, this really is a compelling, interesting idea and we should really push it. Early play tests didn't go

so well. The team kept putting in and pulling out various mechanics to tweak the experience, from the way that you did combat to how well Ellie the female protagonists could be spotted or could be hidden. But towards the end of the development process, about a month out, playtesters were coming back to the team with questions that had nothing to do with the mechanics. They wanted to know what happened to the characters. So this wasn't about glitches

or bugs or exploits or anything like that. This was about plot and narrative. People were connecting with those characters in the game, and they didn't like having to leave them behind without seeing what the end of the story was, which was a big clue to the company that they had a hit, They had a successful storyline, they had something that was resonating with playtesters. It was definitely on

the right track. The Last of Us launched in two thousand thirteen, which was late in the life cycle of the PlayStation three. Now, by the rules of consoles, it probably shouldn't have sold that many copies because people were looking ahead to the next iteration of the PlayStation. Everyone's waiting for the PlayStation four. Why buy more games for an old console when the new ones right around the corner.

And yet the reception was overwhelmingly positive. It became the fifth highest rated PlayStation three game on the aggregator service Metacritic, and sales figures were also very high. Since the Last of Us, Naughty Dog has worked on more sequels and some remasters. In fact, one year after the Last of Us came out for the PS three, Naughty Dog released a remastered version for the PS four. There are numerous PlayStation gamers out there who will own up to buying

both versions of the game. The company, Oh, by the way, I'm one of those people. The company also released Uncharted for a Thief's End, which was a uh the final chapter of the Nathan Drake saga, and they released a spinoff standalone game called Uncharted The Lost Legacy. So, now that Nathan Drake stories over, the company has addressed what a lot of gamers said, we're tough questions. They said, why are you abandoning Nathan Drake? The company said, well,

the narrative had reached a natural conclusion. Nathan Drake was at the natural end of his story. And also from a technical standpoint, they were finding it increasingly difficult to create games that were set in a grounded universe that somehow would outdo their predecessors. So, for example, and Uncharted too, you have this big train sequence that includes a train wreck and climbing up a train that's dangling off the side of a cliff. This is a big action moment.

But if your protagonist is a human who does not possess superpowers or crazy spy gadgets or any other things that augment their abilities, at some point you run up against barriers that push believability too far. As it stands, Nathan Drake must have insane stamina to be able to scale walls endlessly without his arms giving out. So what they were saying is we can't have it both ways.

We can't set the world in a grounded universe and continue to outdo what we have already done, because we've already pushed our character to the point where anything more than that stresses believability too far. In co president Christoph Blestra announced he was retiring from the company. He had worked at Naughty Dog for fifteen years, with a decade of that being in the position of co president. Evan Wells remains at Naughty Dog. He's now the sole president

of the company. Amy Hennig, the lead writer for the Uncharted series, had left Naughty Dog in two thousand fourteen. She had joined e A's Visceral Games, which was focusing on Star Wars games at the time. I find that interesting because in the early nineties, Hennig had worked for e A before. Back then, but she left e A to go join a different company called Crystal Dynamics, because at least in part, she found the idea of working for a small start up more appealing than a giant company.

But then she leaves Naughty Dog and goes back to e A for Visceral Games. Also well in e A shut down Visceral Games and canceled the development of those Star Wars titles, So her current role is up in the air. She might have a good idea of what

she's doing, but based on my research, I don't. Bruce Straley, who was one of the leads on the Last of Us, also left Naughty Dog in two thousand seventeen, and there was also a troubling story that developed late in twenty seven team that involved an ex employee named David Ballard. He alleged that he was fired after he had filed allegations saying that he was the target of sexual harassment

from a senior team member over at Naughty Dog. Naughty Dog has released a statement that said they found no evidence that Ballard had ever filed such a claim. So that was the last I heard on that particular matter, but it is a troubling one. As for what is next, the gaming world is eagerly anticipating the release of The Last of Us two, which is rumored to have a release date sometime in twenty nineteen. The company has, as

of this recording, not announced an official release date. Just a few days before I recorded this episode, Neil Druckman posted an image on Twitter of a dog wearing a mo cap suit. Yep, a real living furree doggie wearing a mo cap suit. So it's possible the next Last of Us will have a canine companion for part of the game that come, and he has been quiet about those release dates, possibly to offset any disappointment that might

happen should development take longer than they had planned. If you never announce a release date and you miss it, no one else knows, and you can just keep on doing what you're doing, Whereas if you announce a release date and then miss it, everyone gets on your case. Naughty Dog has released a couple of teasers for the Last of Us to One of them shows an older Ellie playing guitar, and another teaser shows some new characters in a particularly grizzly scene which was super dark even

for the Last of Us. Beyond that, people at Naughty Dog have largely remained quiet on what they're working on at the company. Perhaps in the near future we'll see some new intellectual property coming out from the studio. They may once again redefine the work of a company that has its roots in a knockoff of Punch Out. Who's to say and that concludes the Naughty Dog story so far. I look forward to seeing what games they produced in the future. Sure, I have played several of their more

recent titles. I was not a PlayStation owner in the early days, so Crash Bandicoot and Jackson Dexter or jack and Dexter both kind of passed me by. But I've definitely played the Uncharted series and The Last of Us, and I love those games quite a bit. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover on tech Stuff, maybe it's another company, maybe it's a personality, maybe it's a specific type of technology. Maybe there's someone you think I should interview for this show. Send me

a message let me know. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle it both of those is tech Stuff h s W. Don't forget we have an Instagram account. Make sure you go out and follow that and I record these shows live on Wednesdays and Friday's and you can watch me stumble my way through these tech topics by going to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. The schedule is up there.

There's a chat room you can join it and you can also join me in welcoming our new super producer Torii, who joins the show for the first time today. That was tor and I will talk to you guys again. Releasing for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com