In the mid-to-late '90s, the studio was best-known for Crash Bandicoot, but as time has gone on -- and since it joined Sony's first party stable -- Naughty Dog's drive to create the best mascot platformers, like Jak & Daxter, has evolved into some of the most stunningly realistic and engaging story-driven action titles of the current generation in the form of the Uncharted trilogy and The Last of Us.
I’ve already written The History of Sony Bend, The History of Sony San Diego, The History of Santa Monica, and The History of Insomniac. But one piece I’ve wanted to write more than any other is The History of Naughty Dog. After (literally) years of trying to tell this story, I was finally given the access necessary for such an endeavor, one that covers three decades of riveting history from Sony's crown jewel developer.
This past summer, Naughty Dog invited me to its gorgeous office space at Water Garden in Santa Monica, California, where I spent three full days picking the brains of some of the company's most senior, most tenured employees. From Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra to Amy Hennig and Neil Druckmann – and even the company’s co-founders, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin – Naughty Dog gave me unprecedented access to nearly 20 people, where I could ask whatever I wanted. And I did.
These three days resulted in such an enormous wealth of information that the idea of one long-form piece has turned into five. Indeed, the final product will be bigger than every other history-of I've written combined. This is merely part one.
Welcome to the most complete history of Naughty Dog ever written. I hope you enjoy it.
Colin Moriarty (September 27, 2013)
I. Jason and Andy’s Hebrew School Magic
In Judaism, you become a man at age 13 in a ceremony known as a Bar Mitzvah, and such a step requires studious preparation at something aptly-named pre-Bar Mitzvah class. It was in one such class that two 12-year-olds – Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin – met. Rubin and Gavin would go on to found one of the most prolific studios in the history of the gaming industry, but their origins are far more unassuming.In Mr. Simon’s class in northern Virginia, a group of like-minded kids sat together, not paying too much attention to the rigors of pre-Bar Mitzvah. “There was this little club,” Gavin explained. “Jason and I and two other guys, we found we liked video games and we had Apple IIs,” the cream-of-the-crop personal computer of the early-‘80s and the very first mass-market computer ever created.“I’d been programming for two years,” Gavin continued, “and Jason had been making little games of his own, too.” Upon examining each other’s crude projects, the two boys almost immediately learned that their individual skillset could fill in the other’s weakness. Their friendship – and subsequent partnership – began in earnest.
“For being 12, [my games] were very advanced code-wise, and Jason’s looked great, because he had this artistic inclination. He could draw really well. But his didn’t run very well and mine didn’t look very good. So really quickly, we were like, ‘Hey, we should get together.’” They began working with each other to create projects that were more complete using both of their specialties.
For being 12, [my games] were very advanced code-wise, and Jason’s looked great, because he had this artistic inclination.
Gavin, Rubin, and their computer-using contemporaries grew up in a time when understanding computers was a rarity, especially when it came to people their age. Overcoming hard-to-conquer issues became their specialty out of sheer necessity, a skill all the more useful when you consider they did it without the Internet.“
“One of the great things about the business, both video games and computers in general at that time, everything was new,” Gavin said. “Few people had them. People didn’t really know anything about them. These days, lots of kids use computers. Knowing how to program or use computers then, there were very few of us.”
“You couldn’t get information,” Rubin noted. “If you had a problem, there were no answers.” To find any sort of clarity early in their partnership, the boys often had to go to super-specialized Apple user groups or call accessible industry intelligentsia and hope they could help.“There would be some guy I always called ‘The Gandalf,’” Rubin recounted, talking about the kind of person he’d often encounter at user groups or on the phone, “some guy with a long white beard that was the senior guy. He probably didn’t know that much, but he answered the questions, because there were no online forums. There were books, but there were very few books… Books don’t answer questions like Google does, clearly. How many books could you buy? You couldn’t search for them online.”
One major source of information for them was Byte Magazine, but even that was super-niche. Then again, they wouldn’t have it any other way. “It was nice that everybody didn’t know how to program,” Rubin admitted, “because if you knew how to do it, you had a leg up on the rest of the world.”
It was nice that everybody didn’t know how to program, because if you knew how to do it, you had a leg up on the rest of the world.
With their partnership forged and their ability to solve a litany of problems solidified, Rubin and Gavin had their own ideas that they wanted to get off the ground, but it was an advanced arcade game that they truly coveted: the original arcade iteration of Punch-Out!!. Instead of making their own game, they decided to copy Nintendo’s. And like bold kids that didn’t know any better, they began making a facsimile of the game in 1983.“
“We could have made another fighting game like that, but no, we actually copied all the characters exactly,” Gavin admitted. “It never occurred to us that you can’t just put out a game that copies characters exactly.” But that didn’t stop them. The boys used 1000 ISO film to record all of the game’s moves, and then began to copy it verbatim using their chops for programming and art. They worked on their unofficial PC port of Punch-Out!! for a year. “It was actually pretty good,” Gavin noted proudly.But then, in 1984, disaster struck. No, Nintendo didn’t send its army of lawyers after Rubin and Gavin (Rubin’s father, ironically, was an IP lawyer and told the boys what they were doing was illegal, though that didn’t put a freeze on their activities). They instead undid themselves with a common error in early personal computing: they accidentally overrode their work. “While trying to make a backup of it, I think I accidentally copied a blank floppy onto the only copy. I can’t remember exactly, but basically, we lost it due to 12-year-old backup habits.” Their hack of Punch-Out!! was gone forever.
(Insanely, this wasn’t the only time they lost one of their games well into development. An original golf game they toiled on several years later was also lost when Gavin accidentally overrode the only copy they had.)
Out of the ashes of self-defeat came something better, though: their first original game. It was called Math Jam, and it, like so many other Apple II games of the time, was educational. Gavin and Rubin weren’t yet known as Naughty Dog; they instead branded their game as coming from JAM: Jason and Andy’s Magic. Their new company incorporated in 1984. They were 14-years-old.
To hell with that. There are no rules with games. You can just put them out.
“We got the idea, I don’t remember how, to do this math game,” Gavin said. “I think someone’s friend or parent or something was a teacher for disadvantaged children.” It had a “fun character” in it “that taught basic arithmetic.”“
JAM self-published the game, as many early indie Apple devs did, by copying the game onto five-and-a-quarter-inch discs, photocopying basic instructions, and throwing it all in a Ziploc bag. They started selling Math Jam to schools in 1985, until they ran into a pretty major problem for 15-year-olds to overcome.
To get Math Jam into more schools, they had to somehow navigate the educational bureaucracy. They were “told to get three or four psychiatrists and 16 teachers to sign off on” Math Jam before they could start selling more copies, Rubin explained.
“To hell with that,” he continued. “There are no rules with games. You can just put them out.”
II. Going Bigger
The unexpected challenges Rubin and Gavin encountered while making Math Jam pushed them to create projects that were more in-line with their love of games. “[Math Jam] was a game, but we thought educational was a higher calling, right?” Rubin asked rhetorically. But the business realities of making an educational product didn’t make things easy for them. “So we started making games. That was our passion,” he later said.Their first game was called Ski Crazed, and it released in 1986, when the boys were 16. It was a title that they iterated on for some time. “Jason was hacking this ski game,” Gavin recounted, noting that it was originally called Ski Stud. “It had that 1984, Hot Dog... The Movie ethos, where you were going to ski down the slope and then pick up chicks and go in the hot tub, that kind of thing.”
One of their greatest out-of-left-field solutions was manipulating an Apple II program called Pinball Construction Set to create art for their games...
Unfortunately, Ski Stud, as it was still known, wasn’t running all that well. Rubin wrote it in BASIC, “and it was really, really slow,” Gavin said. “As you went down the hill, it got slower and slower. So I rewrote it in Assembly and it got fast.”“
The lead-up to the release of Ski Crazed forced Gavin and Rubin to tackle issues in unique ways, something they did time and time again. One of their greatest out-of-left-field solutions was manipulating an Apple II program called Pinball Construction Set to create art for their games, going pixel-by-pixel with the crude tools of the time: a terrible touchpad and a tiny portion of a CRT monitor.
“Paint programs weren’t very good, and almost none of them included pixel editing,” Gavin said. “They would use the joystick. There were no mice, just these really lousy touchpads that were really spastic. The Pinball Construction Set bumper editor,” thankfully, “actually had zoom mode, although it was also kind of spastic.”Rubin’s art in their early projects required an incredible amount of patience to create. Using barely-functioning tablet technology, he had to try to steady the “three pixel jitter” of Pinball Construction Set’s pixel editor. “You’d hit it, miss, undo. Hit it, miss, undo. Each pixel, to get the line. It was an absolute nightmare,” Rubin admitted.
But there was more. To get the art from Pinball Construction Set to their games, they had to trick their Apple IIs to give them the created images. “You couldn’t save, so the only way to get the image out was to do a reset on the hardware, on the Apple hardware, and then you could catch the cache of the graphics when it was in the frame buffer,” Rubin said. In other words, they had to constantly hard-reset their machines, over and over again, split what they needed from all the data being dumped, and repeat the process.
You couldn’t save, so the only way to get the image out was to do a reset... on the Apple hardware...
Gavin and Rubin conquered problems like this regularly, and both men feel that it was these trials and tribulations that not only made them into the successful game creators they would later become, but that their experience is a common theme among the first generation of game programmers, designers, and artists.“
Rubin recounted an experience two decades later, after he and Gavin sold Naughty Dog to Sony and left the company. They founded a separate company, called Flektor, and Rubin had to get into the weeds to show his young artists that difficult tasks aren’t necessarily insurmountable.
“We had five artists [at Flektor]. I said to the artists, ‘I need a three-by-three font for the copyright notice we have to put on [our video editing tool], because there’s no way we’re going to spend 10 pixels of screen real estate doing some sort of font. Gimme a three-by-three font.’”
“A couple hours later, they came back and said, ‘A three-by-three font is impossible. How do you do an S?’ I said, ‘You do it.’ ‘When we type it in, Photoshop won’t give us a font that’s less than six. Six is the minimum.’ ‘Draw it by hand!’ ‘We can’t. The tablet, the brush…’ ‘Just do it pixel-by-pixel with the mouse!’ ‘We can’t do it.’ ‘I can do it.’ ‘Yeah, right!’”
“15 minutes later, I had written out the copyright notice in three by three font and it was legible. They had no idea it could be done.”
I think that’s lost on a lot of the newer generation, who simply expect to be given tools and to work with those tools.
“I think there’s a reason why a lot of the cutting-edge stuff is still being done by people that started 20 or 30 years ago,” he continued. “That is, you don’t expect it to be handed to you. You have to go figure it out. You’re given a piece of hardware or a piece of code or a tool set. Then you push the limits of it and figure out what it can do by experimentation, rather than manuals or something else. I think that’s lost on a lot of the newer generation, who simply expect to be given tools and to work with those tools. A perfect example of that is Photoshop, which is so easy to use now with brushes and tablets that nobody thinks about pixel editing with a mouse and drawing a font. There are so many font tools. Who would ever draw one by hand?”“
This mentality allowed them to persevere in a market that was finally starting to recover from the infamous Video Game Crash. They pitched Ski Stud to a small, Michigan-based publisher called Baudville, and Baudville bit. It was at that time that the name changed to Ski Crazed at the publisher’s request. “They were fairly small time. They might have had 30 or 40 employees,” Gavin recounted.Ski Crazed sold about 1,500 units, netting them around $2 per copy. During the development of the game, the pair began moving away from crude tools like Pinball Construction Set, moving on to a program known as Take One. Since their computers were purchased by their parents, there was nothing to pay off or acquire; the money they earned could go into the next game. But there was one item in particular that they coveted, but couldn’t afford: a hard drive.
When talking about the games they lost due to backup errors, Gavin and Rubin recalled a a guy down the street from them who had, in 1984, a then-unheard of 5 megabyte hard drive. It cost $24,000. “I remember seeing the first five megabyte hard drive and thinking, ‘this guy must be loaded!’” Gavin said.
Ski Crazed sold about 1,500 units, netting them around $2 per copy.
But that guy wasn’t loaded; he was a thief. “He had actually stolen it,” Gavin continued, “which we didn’t know at the time. He was like 14, too. He had done over $100,000 worth of credit card fraud. The FBI arrested him, actually. He didn’t go to jail, but he got in deep trouble.”“
Instead of following a similar course, Gavin and Rubin utilized the tools at their disposal and the money earned from Baudville (which allowed them to purchase a precious second disc drive), and took the next step forward in their careers, crafting a trio of games quite unlike Math Jam, Ski Crazed, or anything they created before.
III. Electronic Artists
Gavin and Rubin didn’t make an incredible amount of money from their deal with Baudville, but at 16-years-old, they were pretty content. Enough so that, for their next game, they would continue their partnership with the fledgling publisher on a game called Dream Zone. It would launch in 1987.Dream Zone was an adventure game combining the genre’s text-heavy slant with graphics that were quite advanced for the time. And it was the first game the guys created that didn’t only run on Apple II; it also came to Commodore’s Amiga platform. It’s most akin, perhaps, to Myst, though it preempted that game by over seven years. “It was like Myst with bad graphics,” Rubin said, jokingly.As its title suggests, Dream Zone was about… well, a dream. In particular, a “kid who fell into a weird dream. You were trapped in a dream,” Gavin explained. “You went into dreamland through the toilet. It actually featured digitized graphics at the beginning. We did a weird Wizard of Oz thing where it was black and white digitized graphics when you were in your real life, and then it went into color, Jason-drawn graphics.”
Dream Zone was a modest hit for JAM and Baudville alike. The game sold upwards of 10,000 copies, earning the guys about $15,000 for their hard work. At 17-years-old, their success was exemplary, but they also wanted more for themselves and their games. And part of that, during their last year of high school, was to end their relationship with Baudville.
“Baudville wasn’t much of a marketer and they didn’t have very good distribution,” Gavin explained. “[Dream Zone] wouldn’t be in every store. So Jason and I were like, ‘eh, they’re too small.’ We went up [to Michigan] and they were kinda stoners. Definitely one of the two partners was a serious stoner. Not that we saw it, but he was just, ‘dude, mellow out.’”
[Dream Zone] sold upwards of 10,000 copies, earning the guys about $15,000 for their hard work.
“That was going to be a recurring theme with Naughty Dog, which I still think pervades the building [Naughty Dog works in],” Rubin interjected. “We felt it was our destiny to be the biggest and the best. Therefore, any time we felt that there was something standing in our way, such as our publisher wasn’t good enough, we simply called the publisher, through their front line, and said, ‘We’re Naughty Dog. We should be working for you.’ Although technically, at that time, we weren’t called Naughty Dog.”“
As such, their next step was the boldest move they made up to that point. At 17-years-old, with three games under their belt, they cold-called EA –- Electronic Arts -- and asked them for a deal. Shockingly, when they called, they were put right through to the company’s decision-makers.
Upon request, Gavin and Rubin shipped EA a copy of Dream Zone, which impressed the company. “’Stuff looks good,’” Gavin recalled the EA representative telling them. “’We’ll send you a contract.’” They asked EA for $15,000 to make their next game, a paltry sum of money. On top of that, EA gave them 10 percent of each copy of their new game sold. This was at a time when EA, stressing the "Electronic Artists" moniker, were all about trying to treat the people who made the games like stars. It was the directive of EA’s legendary founder, Trip Hawkins.
Unfortunately for EA, $15,000 wasn’t enough money for Rubin and Gavin to make their next game, which ended up being an RPG called Keef the Thief. It cost more like $48,000 in the end, still a low sum of money in an industry that mostly had its costs in control, and could still make a profit even on games that didn’t sell gangbusters. Gavin explained more about EA’s situation at the time.“Occasionally, [EA] had games that got cancelled or failed or whatever, but the thing is, you didn’t have to sell very much to make money. They made a lot of money in those days. I mean, they still do today, presumably, but it’s harder. Those days, they spent 50 grand on this game, and they sold it for $40 or $50. Maybe their wholesale was $20 or so. So they only had to sell a couple thousand copies, basically. If it came out, it broke even or made money.”
Keef the Thief launched in 1989, and eventually came to Apple II, Amiga, and MS-DOS. It was the first game sold under the Naughty Dog moniker – a name the pair settled on during Keef’s development -- and it sold a staggering 50,000 copies, making Gavin and Rubin a healthy sum of money. But it also gave them their first unsavory taste of the loss of absolute creative control, and it ultimately affected their vision for the game.
[Keef the Thief] sold a staggering 50,000 copies...
It started out as a serious RPG, but EA insisted on making it funnier, even giving the guys a comedy writer. The comedy slant was compounded with cartoonish box art that didn’t quite do the game justice. “The problem was, the marketplace wasn’t fully prepared for a comedy RPG at the time,” Rubin said. “It was funny. But it was an odd kind of funny. A video game writer writing comedy very early in the days of video games having comedy.”“
“It was sort of in the Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés school,” Gavin concluded.
“It was a good game,” Rubin insisted. “But it kinda capped out at a certain amount of sales. I remember EA saying to us that we probably shouldn’t have gone with comedy, after the fact. That kind of stung me, because it was one of those things where we didn’t have an opportunity to decide what was going on. We had already signed up, and they had the right to do this.”
But even with those complaints, and even with a loss of creative control, Rubin and Gavin stayed with EA, and pitched them another RPG, one “much more ambitious” and more costly than Keef the Thief, according to Rubin. Its codename was Buccaneer, and they asked for $90,000 to make it. EA agreed, though that cost ballooned to $150,000 when all was said and done.Buccaneer – which would eventually be known as Rings of Power – began development in earnest upon Keef the Thief’s completion in 1989. But the game’s creation was stymied by a very practical problem: Rubin and Gavin were now in college, and they lived in different states.
Their solution was to work all year long with the tools at their disposal. “We were one of the first telecommuters on the planet,” Rubin recounted. “We were using first 300, then 1,200, then 2,400 baud modems to telecommute.” He was attending the University of Michigan, and Gavin was in school in Pennsylvania, so there was no other options than to use their incredibly slow (yet, at the time, quite technologically advanced) modems to send information and data back and forth.The situation changed when school was out. They would reconvene in Virginia during off-months and would toil away in Gavin’s parents’ basement. But even with an easier work environment over the summers, circumstances prolonged the game’s development period. It was supposed to take two years, but it ended up taking closer to three.
Another thing that complicated development was the simple fact that Rings of Power was designed for PC, but ended up being ported to SEGA’s follow-up to its failed console the Master System. It was called the Genesis.
During a visit to EA, the guys spotted Genesis dev kits. “There were these Genesises with ribbon cables sticking out of them, a hole cut in the top and a ribbon cable sticking out,” Gavin explained. “The people at those were always turning off their monitors when anyone came into the cube area or whatever. I was like, ‘hmm, that looks like some kind of Genesis development unit.’ I kept asking about it, but no one would say anything.”
We were one of the first telecommuters on the planet.
It was Trip Hawkins himself that finally spilled the beans on EA’s Genesis development, giving the guys an NDA to fill out. It was then that Gavin in particular learned about what EA was doing with SEGA’s consoles, and why everything was so hush-hush.“
“EA had reverse engineered the machine, and eventually, before coming out with their reverse engineered games, they made a deal with SEGA to get some kind of sweetheart rate.” But this affected the development of early Genesis games for EA. “For a while, we had this really hacked-together machine, this steel box where they had taken apart a Genesis and grafted it to a bunch of other boards… It was incredibly electronically noisy.”
These makeshift Genesis dev kits would alter the signal of any electronics around it, which was at first frustrating, but eventually became a useful tool of development. “When you turned it on, all the TVs on the same electrical circuit started to spit and get a ton of noise on them. People would complain in my dorm about their reception. They didn’t put two and two together. But it was totally the Genesis screwing up all their TVs. You could tell, in someone else’s dorm room, even, what the Genesis was up to. When it crashed, the noise pattern would change. I could see how busy the graphics hardware was from the interference patterns. I would leave the TV across the room on because it was a useful debugging aid,” Gavin said, laughing.Development of Rings of Power was complicated, but, as Gavin noted, this time marked “a very important transition” for Naughty Dog, as they went away from PC and towards console. Following that, they would never again return to their computer gaming roots. Because of this decision, Rings of Power wasn’t quite up to snuff – “it should have been a PC game,” Rubin insisted – but it did very well. It sold through its entire initial allotment of 100,000 copies in only three months when it finally came to Genesis in 1991.
But a phone call from EA cemented in their minds the harsh reality of working with the publisher, a publisher that had just gone public and was finding great success in other, easier-to-sell genres. “They called us and said, ‘we have good news and bad news,’” Rubin recounted. “’Good news is, you’re sold out. Bad news is, we’re not gonna reprint it.’”
“They had this other game they thought was selling better,” Rubin later continued, “and we had a very large cartridge memory size, which cost more, and we had an EEPROM to store a saved game, a battery. So our cartridge cost more and they thought they could sell out of the other one, so they printed the other game instead. That was Madden.”
“So that was the second time EA had said, ‘well, it would have been nice if we could have done better…’”
...our cartridge cost more and they thought they could sell out of the other one, so they printed the other game instead. That was Madden.
Sports games became synonymous with SEGA Genesis, and Naughty Dog got caught-up in the whirlwind at ground zero, losing out on greater success to a group of games that were an easier, cheaper sell. The sales guys at EA, according to Gavin, loved having sports stars around them all the time, and they understood and enjoyed sports games. It put a game like theirs at a disadvantage.“
“You’d have John Madden on a poster bear-hugging some players or something. It’s easy marketing, and you get to meet these famous guys. And all the guys [EA] hired were sports guys,” Gavin said. “You’d be in the regular programming section of the building, and everyone would look like geeks. No offense, because those were our friends. But then you’d go over to the marketing section and everyone was larger and better dressed. They went to sports bars. They couldn’t quote Star Wars. They didn’t really know what to do with our weird game with dragons and magic rings.”
“So we felt a little disenfranchised with the whole business,” Gavin stated. “This was actually the only time in its history that Naughty Dog took a breather.”
IV. Back From Break
Happy with the two games they developed for EA, but stung by the experience of losing creative control and not being fully supported by EA’s marketing machine, Gavin and Rubin decided to leave the industry, at least for a time. On the verge of graduating college (they made all of these games before they even got a college degree), Rubin wanted to go to California to learn to surf, while Gavin decided to chase a Ph.D at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of course, neither of them got quite what they bargained for.
“I actually never got a surfboard and got on the waves,” Rubin said. “I said I was going out there to surf, but I never did it, because I started a special effects company. That got me into 3D graphics.” 3D was very new at the time, and the computers and programs required to do 3D graphics could run $75,000 or more.A prohibitive price point and the relative newness of the industry didn’t stop Rubin from getting a contract for his company, though. That contract came from Columbia Pictures for a movie called Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. “I got offered to do the morph into the wolf,” Rubin said, “which was one shot. I was about to start it when 3DO called” in 1993.
3DO was the brainchild of none other than Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts that worked so closely with the duo previously. He was planning an ambitious and expensive CD-based console slated to launch in 1994. He called the guys with a tantalizing offer that quickly ended their hiatus and got them back into the business of making games.
“[Hawkins] called up and said, ‘you guys, we’re really great at pushing new stuff!’” Gavin recalled. “’You want a dev machine? Just check it out. No strings!’” They accepted his offer.
3DO was the brainchild of none other than Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts...
“We hated the cartridge,” Rubin said, talking about the software format running on everything from an Atari 2600 and an NES to the SNES and Genesis. “We wanted to make big games. We wanted to make games with saved games. We didn’t want to have them say, “’we’re only printing Madden.’ Those things sucked about the cartridge.”“
Gavin expanded on the issue. “Even though the games brought in this huge gross – not as much as today, but a lot at that time – a lot of it was sucked up into cartridge manufacturing. They were really conservative about printing, because it took so long and the cartridges cost so much. If you got caught with extra cartridges, you could lose all the money you had made.”
“That’s a big change with CDs,” he continued. “You could print them fairly fast, and if you got caught with extra inventory of them, it didn’t matter so much. You might have to pay seven bucks for a CD later on. But essentially, the CDs only cost a dollar to make. The economics were different. No one was really out a fortune.”Indeed, Naughty Dog was at the forefront of the fight against cartridges at a time when many in the industry were attacking CDs for having long load times and for being prone to damage. But they swam against the tide, and the company ended up being on the right side of history, even if it didn’t necessarily play out with 3DO.
They accepted Hawkins’ dev kit, and subsequently agreed to make a game for 3DO. And they intentionally went into the development process without a publisher, using the money earned from Rings of Power to fund the new game. They used almost every last cent they had: $80,000.
They used almost every last cent they had: $80,000.
“A bunch of things happened on Rings of Power, and happened on Keef the Thief, that we really sort of resented,” Gavin admitted. “We resented this process that EA had where you had to write the script and get it approved and basically design your whole game up front. We spent like a year on Rings of Power, or nine months or something, with this gigantic 300-page script, dickering over details in it and getting it approved. And then, in the end, when we actually made the game, no one looked at the script.”“
Designing on the fly was the “appropriate way to make games,” Rubin insisted, though Gavin also noted that marketing was another major problem that made them want to flee from a publisher. In Rings of Power, “there were high tech and guns together. [EA marketing] was like, ‘I don’t know if we want to market to both of those. We’ve never seen that before. They should make it all one or the other.’”“The truth is,” Gavin said, “as we knew, the same guys liked fantasy and science fiction.” EA wasn’t interested in reading a 300-page script and game design documents, and frankly, Gavin and Rubin were far more interested in creating as they went then explaining their ideas up front. With Way of the Warrior, their 3DO game, they flew by the seat of their pants.
“Nobody’s going to tell us why our broad call is wrong,” Gavin later said about Way of the Warrior, because there was no publisher constantly looking over their shoulders. Self-funding also allowed them to be smarter with their money and time and go where the gamers – and the money – were. “We’re gonna look at, before starting the game, what’s hot now and what’s a good bang for the buck development-wise and try to make the best game in that. To do a little more market timing. Our previous games, there was no market timing to them.”
“They were just what Andy wanted to play or what I wanted to play,” Rubin added.
[Naughty Dog's previous games] were just what Andy wanted to play or what I wanted to play.
When Way of the Warrior’s development began in 1993, fighting games were really hot. Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Samurai Shodown were tearing up the arcade and the living room alike. Way of the Warrior was going to be 3DO’s fighting game, and it was to go up against the best Midway, Capcom, and SNK had to offer.“
They felt it was a fairly easy genre to create a game in. “It wouldn’t take us the three years the past games had taken us,” Rubin said. “RPGs are just bigger and take a lot more time and effort.” Fighting games, on the other hand, are very direct. You have your characters and you have your stages, and once the game is running – which didn’t take much to do – all of the fine-tuning great fighting games required could be accomplished.
“All the [development] resources were put into two characters on screen. They’re big. They got a lot of animation and a lot of moves relative to other games at the time, which had a different balance resource-wise,” Gavin explained. “So we looked at this and we’re like, ‘that’s a good bang for the buck.’… You make one background and one character, you play against yourself, and you’ve got a playable game. You could start working out balance issues and play issues and stuff.”Rubin and Gavin decided to take a “digitized direction” with Way of the Warrior, much like Mortal Kombat. “At some levels, it’s kind of a slightly more comedic Mortal Kombat ripoff. It’s very over the top,” Gavin said. Their major inspiration was the droves of Hong Kong kung-fu movies they watched together.
To make the game, they knew they had to be in the same location again. Rubin tried to get Gavin to move to Newport Beach, California, but Gavin was still attending MIT, and he convinced Rubin to come to the wintery suburbs of Boston. Gavin acquired a subpar apartment for them to live in as they worked, and they went about the business of creating a 3DO game.
For the first time, they brought on contractors to help them complete the game.
They couldn’t afford to get a traditional blue screen, so they bought a tan-colored screen -- practically a tarp -- and nailed it to the wall in their living room. It covered the only windows in the apartment, and it covered up their air conditioning vents, as well. Because they positioned it on a certain wall, since they lacked the proper lenses for their camera, it also complicated the act of actually filming.“
To get shots against the screen, they had to open their front door and film from their hallway, which confused – and freaked-out – their academic neighbors that attended MIT and Harvard. Meanwhile, Gavin would stay up ‘til all hours of the night working on audio processing. The two men mimicked the kung-fu “hiya!” sounds that would creepily seep out of their apartments as their neighbors tried to sleep.
But while Way of the Warrior was a game designed to be easy to develop, it became a project that was too big for them to handle. For the first time, they brought on contractors to help them complete the game. It was the last time Gavin and Rubin worked on a game by themselves.“It quickly got to the point where, for the first time, two people couldn’t make the whole game,” Rubin said. Because of the fact that they didn’t use a proper blue screen to get footage, it required them to laboriously cut out, pixel-by-pixel, the characters they filmed. They loved the look they got from their approach – they described it as a “Sin City” style – but they needed to get others to help them achieve it by doing the grunt work.
“So we went out,” Rubin continued, “and we put up, literally, on bulletin boards, for people to do this” cropping, cutting, and coloring. “We got people to come in and do the tedious part.”
The folks they got to help them on Way of the Warrior were from all walks of life. One guy was a law student. Another was a Boston-area native who, after his experience with the game, ended up staying in the industry and still works on games today. And their lead tester? He was the Valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1994, a guy named David Liu.
And their lead tester? He was the Valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1994, a guy named David Liu.
Liu’s not only famous for his academic pedigree, or because of his early work with Naughty Dog. He was a prolific, professional Street Fighter II player. “He was one of those savant guys at Street Fighter who’s just insanely good,” Gavin said. Liu would even try to plug Way of the Warrior during television interviews about his time at Harvard, and was on wanted lists at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City for card counting.“
And then, there were the characters in the game. “The other thing is, the people we got to play in this video game were all friends and family,” Rubin said. “We couldn’t afford to pay anyone.” One of the characters in the game was one of Gavin’s MIT professors. He’s Dr. Rodney Brooks, “who’s probably the foremost robot scientist in the world,” according to Gavin, and the head of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Another was a friend of theirs named Vijay, who had an MIT Ph.D in molecular biology, a post-doc from Berkeley, and is, presently, “gunning for the Nobel Prize in protein folding.”
“He’s the secret character in the diaper,” Gavin said with a smile.They didn’t only lack the funds to pay actors; they also lacked the money to give them proper costumes. Vijay wore a pillowcase as underpants, and another bed sheet as his turban. The jewel in front of the turban was “from a secondhand Jasmine dress-up kit for little girls. As in Jasmine from Aladdin,” Gavin noted.
During production, the two nearly ran out of money. Rubin had $6.37 in his bank account. “I was eating ramen noodles with Andy,” he recalled. Gavin had it just a little better; he was getting paid $14,000 a year to go through MIT’s masters program. They sold their remaining belongings, like a stereo, to get by while they finished the game.
Andy’s toilet froze and shattered. It was a disaster, okay?
Their living situation deteriorated during these tough times. “Morgan, Jason’s dog, lived with us,” Gavin said. “She was this awesome black lab-ridgeback mix, but she shed a lot. We had this white wall-to-wall carpet. We had not vacuumed in an entire year. There was more visible Morgan hair on the floor than there was carpet. People would come in and look at the carpet and go, ‘ewwwwww, what is with your carpet?’ You could scrape hair and leave white streaks.”“
“Andy’s toilet froze and shattered,” Rubin noted abruptly. “It was a disaster, okay? We went all-in on this game, in the sense that startups go all in. We went all-in on this game. The last $10,000 that we had, effectively – although we didn’t spend it last, it would have been our last money – we bought a three-by-three square foot spot at the 3DO booth at CES, because the game show was still at CES. Nine square feet.”
Without a publisher, the idea was to show the game off at 1994’s CES and perhaps drum-up some interest. And in their tiny, modest space, surrounded by “crap” multimedia games, drum-up interest they did. In fact, so much interest was drummed-up that a bidding war erupted over Way of the Warrior between three companies. All of them wanted a piece of Naughty Dog’s project.The players were 3DO itself, Universal Studios, and Crystal Dynamics. “We came closest with Crystal Dynamics,” Rubin remembered, “but there was a split inside Crystal Dynamics. Half of the people loved the game and wanted to put it out. The other half wanted to buy it and use the engine to make Samurai Shodown, which they had acquired the rights to… But they weren’t going to tell us until they had licensed the game. Then they would tell us, ‘you have only one chance now, and that’s to work on Samurai Shodown, and that’s the only way you’re going to get paid,’ effectively. We caught onto that.”
Had we gone with 3DO as an exclusive, it could have been the end of Naughty Dog.
Hawkins put the pressure on the guys to give 3DO the rights to the game using what they described as his endless charm and positivity, or his “reality distortion field.” He “just had a lot of personal charisma,” Gavin noted. “He’s an incredibly nice and fair guy, too. Every business deal we had with him, he was extremely fair and generous. That was very refreshing to have a businessman who was always fair.”“
But they didn’t know if he was painting an honest picture for them. “I used to put a pencil between my leg and the table we were sitting at, with the pointed end down, and jab myself every now and then, to remind myself not to fall under his spell,” Rubin said. “He was an incredibly persuasive person.” It affected everyone around him, including his employees, who seemed to hang on his every word.
“But Universal offered us to come on the lot to make additional games, to fund additional games, to give us creative freedom, and it just sounded a lot cooler,” Rubin concluded. “Plus, I loved LA. It was, in the end, a better deal. For us, this was one of the big decision points. Had we gone with 3DO as an exclusive, it could have been the end of Naughty Dog.”
Those games that Universal promised to let Naughty Dog make while giving them complete creative freedom would all fall under an all-new series Gavin and Rubin would come up with when driving across the country. That series would be known as Crash Bandicoot.
In 1995, Naughty Dog co-founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin were on the verge of something big. They just didn’t know it yet. Following the creation of their lone 3DO game -- the fighter known as Way of the Warrior -- Gavin and Rubin were given a tantalizing offer.
As discussed at the end of Part I, Universal Interactive Studios – the winner of the CES bidding war over Way of the Warrior – offered Rubin and Gavin a three game contract. Universal wanted to continue its relationship with Naughty Dog in the creation of a new game, but Naughty Dog didn’t know what that game would be.
Little did they know they would end up concocting a new mascot for the fledgling PlayStation brand that would, for a time, outshine, outperform, and outsell Nintendo’s very own Mario.
Disclaimer: Contains Profanity
I. A New Kind of Game
It took about a year and a half, and just about all of their money, but Rubin and Gavin’s Way of the Warrior finally launched on 3DO in 1995. But their future didn’t rest with the 3DO – which was only a year away from being discontinued after selling a paltry two million consoles – and they knew it.“Way of the Warrior came out. It was what it was,” Rubin said, obliquely referencing the game’s mediocre quality and soft sales. “But Universal said to us, ‘pick a platform, pick an IP, pick a type of game, and we’ll fund it.’”
Andy and I had what we always wanted, which was freedom, but also freedom with enough money to really do stuff.
After a couple of years of hunkering down in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the duo got into a car and began driving to California, the home of Universal. During the cross-country ride, they began formulating their plans for their next game. Just as they did before making Way of the Warrior, the partners surveyed the gaming landscape to ensure they went in a logical direction. They wanted to again cater to what the market wanted, and not just themselves.“
“First, we were like, ‘what genre should we do?’” Rubin explained. “Character action games were some of the biggest games out there. Sonic and Mario. This was before the PlayStation was announced. So let’s do one of those. If we can, we’ll find hardware where we can be exclusive, because that had worked really well on 3DO.”And so, the nugget of the idea for Crash Bandicoot was innocuously born, though it wasn’t at all fleshed out yet. Nonetheless, with an idea to work off of, Gavin and Rubin had to confront a glaring problem: who would help them make the game? They couldn’t do it alone anymore, as the process creating Way of the Warrior proved. Even creating titles like Keef the Thief and Rings of Power taxed their time, and game development itself was moving into a different, much more complicated phase.
“Andy and I had what we always wanted, which was freedom, but also freedom with enough money to really do stuff,” Rubin explained. “[Universal] said, ‘first, what would you do to improve your development?’ We said, ‘we’d hire employees.’ They said, ‘do that.’ So, for the first time, Andy and I had the ability to build our own company.”
Two of the first people they hired were Dave Baggett, a personal friend from Gavin’s days at MIT, and Taylor Kurosaki, an experienced visual effects artist working in the television industry. Kurosaki is still with Naughty Dog today, although he took a hiatus from the company during the latter Crash days and early Jak & Daxter days.
We were primarily doing work on a TV show on NBC called SeaQuest DSV, with Roy Scheider and the dolphin.
“I was working at Universal Studios on the back lot, doing visual effects for a fledgling little division of Amblin,” Kurosaki said. “We were primarily doing work on a TV show on NBC called SeaQuest DSV, with Roy Scheider and the dolphin.” Holding such a job was a considerable feat for Kurosaki, who was only 23-years-old at the time. Other than Babylon 5, SeaQuest was the only show on television doing CGI, and he was familiar with the early tools of the trade, notably Lightwave.“
“While I was working on that TV show, a couple of guys moved into the same building that we were working in on the back lot,” Kurosaki continued. “That was Andy and Jason, who had just moved out here to LA from the east coast to start work on an unannounced game. [This was] the first time they were going to be working on a game that was more than the two of them and some other buddies.”
Kurosaki befriended Gavin, Rubin, and Baggett, playing Wallyball with them on the back lot and generally being happy that he could talk to some other 20-somethings. “We hung out socially, [and] they were really interested in what I was doing,” he said. “Jurassic Park had just come out. The one thing I was envious of with Jurassic Park was that all those guys were using Silicon Graphics and PowerAnimator to do their visual effects, while I was using Lightwave.”“Andy and Jason had SGIs and were using PowerAnimator to work on this video game,” Kurosaki concluded. “I was like, ‘oh, I really want to learn this.’ They basically just said, ‘why don’t you come work with us?’ That’s how I started at Naughty Dog.”
Our first days of work were seeing these closed-door meetings showing the PSX, showing Ridge Racer on the PSX...
Kurosaki’s first day at work was January 5, 1995. He was Naughty Dog Employee #2 (behind Dave Baggett), and his first day of work coincided with CES in Las Vegas. He was “sharing a room with Jason and Andy at the Imperial Palace. [Naughty Dog artist] Bob [Rafei] and I were sleeping on the floor. Jason and Andy were sleeping in a king size bed together. Our first days of work were seeing these closed-door meetings showing the PSX, showing Ridge Racer on the PSX and us just going, ‘what the fuck is this?’ We were trying to figure out the game we wanted to make.”“
The game that would eventually become Crash Bandicoot was the result of trying to take advantage of a trend in the industry. Much like Way of the Warrior was created as a response to the fighting game craze, Crash was a product of gaming’s move to 3D, and a result of approaching 3D gaming in a very specific way.“Games were in a transition at the time,” Gavin explained. “Certain genres, in the arcades, had just gone to 3D. It was clear that this was the direction things were headed, as the 3D hardware was coming out, but it was really early. The first one to go was racing. Fighting games were just beginning to go with Virtua Fighter.”
Gavin and Rubin shared an affinity for side-scrolling platformers, and figured that if Virtua Fighter could put fighting games into a 3D mold, they could do it with the platformer. They specifically loved the Super Nintendo smash-hit Donkey Kong Country. “We were like, ‘how would this work in 3D?’” Gavin continued. “It was a much more difficult question then, because it’s a more open kind of game. We eventually had what we jokingly called the ‘Sonic’s Ass’ idea.” In other words, a platformer with a camera behind the main character that would follow him around.
Games were in a transition at the time. Certain genres, in the arcades, had just gone to 3D.
“There were three things we came up with” after deciding to create a 3D platformer, Rubin said. “One, just rotate it into 3D, but it’s still side-scrolling. Two, go in and out of the camera, figure out how to do it, but keep it confined still, because it’s still a platform game with a linear progression. Or three, full open. We didn’t think we could do full open at the time.”“
Ironically, developers working on behalf of Sony, SEGA, and Nintendo all came to the same conclusion about 3D gaming. And each company chose a different course for their new respective system’s flagship game, giving players a real choice while showing that the 3D landscape wasn’t very predictable at all.
II. Sony vs. SEGA vs. Nintendo
The mid-‘90s introduced the first true three-way battle for video game console supremacy. With Nintendo and SEGA going head-to-head with SNES and Genesis, it was natural that they would battle again with Nintendo 64 and SEGA Saturn. But Sony, too, would join the fray with PlayStation, a console that, at the end of the war, would end up outselling its competition combined nearly three times over.Still, there was one thing Sony lacked: a mascot. SEGA had Sonic, Nintendo had Mario, but Sony had nothing at all. With Crash Bandicoot, Naughty Dog was about to change all of that, but Sony wasn’t necessarily in the market for a mascot yet, and the small team behind the game had no idea their product even had that kind of potential. First, they had to figure out what their game was and how they’d actually go about making it.SEGA had Sonic, Nintendo had Mario, but Sony had nothing at all.
PlayStation – like N64 and Saturn – supported full, 3D, polygonal games, but “those machines couldn’t handle that many polygons” Gavin admitted. Dave Baggett figured out a way to get around the PlayStation’s inherent limitations by, among other things, creating the DLE, or Dave’s Level Editor.“
With Gavin and Baggett, all was pretty well on a technical level, but Naughty Dog still needed to settle on a final idea to sit alongside its fixed-camera, behind-the-character approach. Thankfully, the team finally had the time and money to really sit and think. After keeping their heads down to formulate an idea, they once again went back to the idea of a 3D Donkey Kong Country. But they still needed a character concept.
“We weren’t in school for the first time. For the first time, all of these things came together, and this became a real job with a real budget and real employees and real attention to detail,” Rubin said. “The character design [of Crash Bandicoot] happened over a long period of time. We used cartoon animators in Hollywood to come in and concept with us, Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. We had real concept design from them.”“This whole camera-on-a-rail and pre-computing and throwing out all the stuff you weren’t going to see [the game use]… it was crazy. It was super bizarre,” Kurosaki explained. “We had an art staff of three people. It was Jason, Bob, and I. That was the art team. We were all just doing the same stuff” as the concept of Crash Bandicoot grew. “I think I made the first Wumpa Fruit.”
“But as we started to figure out what we were good at, Bob became basically the background department. Bob did almost every background in Crash Bandicoot. Jason became the animation department. He did all of the animations. I became the game designer. We all pitched in for each other, but those were the different paths we handled.” And, together, they handled the design of Crash Bandicoot as a character.
For the longest time, Crash’s name was Willy the Wombat.
Donkey Kong Country may have been the biggest inspiration to the team from a gameplay perspective, but it was Looney Tunes that ended up being the biggest inspiration from a character design point-of-view. As Crash’s design came into focus – complete with 532 polygons and the ability to be fully animated (as he lacked a fixed skeleton) -- he started to resemble something from Warner’s classic cartoon series. But what about a name?“
“For the longest time, Crash’s name was Willy the Wombat. That’s what we had settled on. No one really loved it,” Kurosaki admitted, as he explained how he was “pretty sure” that he and Dave Baggett ultimately came up with the Crash moniker. “I wanted it to be Crash Wombat. To this day, I think Crash Wombat rolls off the tongue better than Crash Bandicoot.”Meanwhile, Nintendo had something up its sleeve that would end up revolutionizing 3D gaming: Super Mario 64. SEGA, too, was working on its own 3D game for Saturn called NiGHTS Into Dreams. None of the first parties had any idea its competitors were working on 3D games of their own, ones predicated on each of the branches Rubin and Gavin identified during their road trip from Massachusetts to Southern California.
It was around this time when the idea of the game really started to come together, and Naughty Dog took the first steps toward solidifying its relationship with Sony. Today, Sony is seen as incredibly indie-friendly, but it was nice to smaller studios back in PlayStation’s heyday as well. Sony would eventually rely on studios like Naughty Dog to make its console competitive, and Rubin and Gavin – as the co-founders of the studio – were the 44th and 45th individual developers to sign on with PlayStation.
Sony’s realization that it needed a game like this was just in the nick of time...
“Sony had this weird thing that very few people had where you could get a dev unit as an independent developer, under this different deal,” Gavin explained. “You didn’t really have any terms for getting manufacturing done, but they licensed you the right to do the development under the assumption that you’d find a publisher later.” Even though Naughty Dog already had a deal with a publisher, the fledgling company was technically on its own, because that publisher didn’t own them. This helped them gain easier access to the tools of PlayStation development without all of the paperwork, red tape, and, ultimately, oversight.“[Sony] figured it was a hacker thing,” Rubin continued. “If you got to the point where you could actually develop [a game], you would take it to a publisher and then a publisher would have to review it… Naughty Dog was a contractor for Universal. Never working for them. So we developed on our dev unit, and at alpha, said to Sony, ‘we’ve got your mascot game.’ And Sony had never seen it. They knew everything that was of any value that was being worked on, but they had never seen [Crash].”“
To show Sony what they were working on, the team used Kurosaki’s connections with the SeaQuest DSV staff. He and Gavin sat in the TV show’s editing bay for two days creating a demo to give to Sony. Gavin then handed the tape off to a friend, who he asked to “casually” pass it along to the higher-ups at the company. He did. “The head of [Sony Computer Entertainment America] was like, “’What is that?! That looks so good!’ That’s how it snowballed,” Gavin recalled.
After seeing the tape, Sony “sent down people and they looked at it, and their jaws dropped,” Rubin continued. Sony’s realization that it needed a game like this was just in the nick of time, he explained.
We had no idea what Miyamoto was doing at the time.
“[Sony] had come down, and sure enough – this is where luck played a part – SEGA had Sonic. In this case, they had decided to do NiGHTS. Mario, obviously, and Nintendo were coming on. Sony had no mascot. From alpha, two or three months before E3, they kicked their number one product off the number one slot, right next to Nintendo’s booth, and put Crash there. [Sony] signed a deal with Universal to be the publisher. It went head-to-head with Mario. The first time we had ever seen Mario 64 was at that E3.”“
“We had no idea what Miyamoto was doing at the time,” Kurosaki said. “We had no idea about Mario 64. When that came out, we were a month away from finishing the game. We were like, ‘oh fuck, that’s badass. That’s a whole next level.’ But they couldn’t do the density of environments that we were doing. It was a trade-off.”That E3 solidified for Rubin that his gut instinct of there being “three ways of going” 3D was right. “2D, that was NiGHTS. Our middle of the road, in-and-out, but still platformer [was Crash Bandicoot], and full open world [was Mario 64]. We all chose one of the three ways of going.”
“And it was very independent of each other, because we were all so secretive,” Gavin chimed in.
“I didn’t like the fixed 2D [of NiGHTS],” Rubin admitted. “That’s a copout. I think [SEGA] realized that and didn’t do Sonic with it, because they didn’t feel comfortable about it. The gameplay itself was weak.” So, in reality, there were really only two viable options, because NiGHTS was proof that the third branch may not have been the wisest to take.
We went one way, Mario went the other.
“We went one way, Mario went the other,” Rubin said. “Mario 64 was an incredible game. The thing that makes Mario 64, from a consumer standpoint, perhaps not as competitive, is that visually it was nowhere near what Crash was. That was because as soon as you open up, you have a lot more polygons to draw in the distance. Just visually, it was never where Crash was.”“
“You can talk endlessly about which was a better game. From a consumer standpoint, Crash looked amazing, and that got us a lot of kudos. Now, on Crash One, reviews said, ‘it’s not Mario.’ But we ended up selling more than Mario, partly because the PlayStation had more users, but also because it was a very good game. And we continued to outsell Mario through Crash 2 and Crash 3. CTR (Crash Team Racing) did extremely well. I think it outdid Mario Kart in terms of sales.” [Editor's Note: Mario Kart 64 outsold CTR.]
“Mario had a bigger learning curve, too,” Gavin interjected. “It was much more of a ground-breaking game in a lot of ways, because it had to innovate in so many gameplay areas. But it was a tough game to get your head around the first time. You had to get used to the 3D, get used to controlling the camera. The camera was very frustrating. That’s been solved since, [but you had to] then figure out what the hell you’re going to do.”“Remember, this is the first time most gamers were experiencing 3D,” Rubin said. “Certainly with a freely moving camera. Driving games were always free-roaming, but this was the first time anyone had to deal with this. Yes, gamers will always get it, but the mass market? The PlayStation was the first mass market [gaming] machine. They got Crash. It had a button to jump and a button to spin and the directions. It was easier to play.”
“Your short term goal in Crash is always very obvious,” Gavin noted. “It’s just move forward and stay alive. In Mario, it was like, ‘well, what do you have to do here? You have to open a drain and flood this’ or whatever. It was kind of hard to figure out at first. It was brilliant in its own way, and the way they communicated that without any real language, but there was definitely a steeper learning curve.”
It’s obvious that the free 3D world of Mario 64 became very important. It’s also easy to discount Crash’s world.
Ironically, Kurosaki notes that he thought that Crash was too hard. “Way too hard,” he said of the game. “I feel so bad… this was, again, the first video game I had worked on, and I had never done game design, but I was the lead game designer in a department of one… I had no concept of increasing the difficulty and then allowing the player to play at that difficulty for a period of time. No concept. In my mind, literally every single jump was slightly harder than the one that came before it. I watched my mom play it, and I just said, ‘please, play Crash 2.’”“
“It’s obvious that the free 3D world of Mario 64 became very important,” Rubin admitted. “It’s also easy to discount Crash’s world. But if you look, Field Runner, which is an extremely popular game, is a forced forward left-right jump gameplay mechanic that directly takes from our hog level in Crash 2. It’s identical gameplay. We were the first in-out 3D game, so there’s no question that it descends from us, because nobody else was doing that kind of stuff at the time.”
III. The Rise of a Mascot
Crash Bandicoot launched exclusively on PlayStation in late summer of 1996. Sam Thompson, a long-time Sony producer, joined the company the next year. He started in QA, working as a junior tester on games hailing from studios ranging from Square to Psygnosis (later named Sony Liverpool) to 989 Sports. He later rose up the ladder and now works exclusively with Naughty Dog on Sony’s behalf, but when he started at Sony, it was Crash Bandicoot that got him through the door.It’s interesting, because Sony never really wanted to have a mascot. They want to put the brand first and foremost...
“When I started, Crash was the fucking game for me,” he said. “I was playing games full time at that point. It was bad. I had a pretty massive addiction. It was right around the time the PSone was in full swing.” Serendipitously, when Thompson was testing at Sony, he was assigned Crash 2, right around the time when Crash Bandicoot was going from a one-off project from a relatively unknown developer to the biggest thing Sony had in its arsenal. “When I had the opportunity to work on [Crash] 2, it was awesome,” Thompson quipped.“
“It’s interesting, because Sony never really wanted to have a mascot,” Thompson explained. “They want to put the brand first and foremost: the PlayStation. Everything was secondary to that. Yet, we had these mascots… where it was either Parappa, Crash, a few other characters mixed in that I don’t even remember anymore.”But Crash wasn’t only a hit with the Sony executives. It was a hit with gamers around the world. “Crash was the first game where Sony had found a western-developed game that was critically and commercially successful in Japan. That had never happened before,” Thompson said. “For Crash to sell more than a million units in Japan was a huge deal. That was the one defining moment where the promise of what western development could be was finally attained.”
With huge sales around the globe, PlayStation’s future largely hinged on the success of series like Crash Bandicoot. And things changed a bit. Sony and Universal didn’t get too involved with Crash’s development – and its potential trajectory as a series – until, as Kurosaki explained, “it was clear that this was going to be a hit and it was clear that Sony really needed this game.”
For Crash to sell more than a million units in Japan was a huge deal.
“Again, we were just going to be another game on PlayStation,” Kurosaki explained. “That’s all we knew. I think we just caught lightning in a bottle or whatever and then they were like, ‘oh, you’re our mascot.’”“
Unfortunately for Kurosaki, Universal and Sony’s increased interest in the Crash Bandicoot series interrupted a schedule for a possible sequel that he and the rest of Naughty Dog had settled on.
“The only thing that changed,” he explained, “[was that] we had always planned that Crash 2 was going to come out two years after Crash 1. I had already done all this work, while we were finishing Crash 1, this whole list of features I wanted in Crash 2 that we didn’t have time to implement. Like the camera being able to turn around, a whole bunch of different move sets for Crash. Way expanded mechanics.” Kurosaki had ideas for things that wouldn’t even make it into the series until the third game.Indeed, Crash Bandicoot became so big “that somebody said, ‘We need another Crash for next year,” Kurosaki recalled. And so, he left the company. “There were six of us working on this game, pretty much. I think it was seven by the end. It was a slog. I just wasn’t in the mood to turn around and crank out a bunch more levels.” He wouldn’t come back to Naughty Dog for seven years, during the development of Jak 3.
Kurosaki’s exit was no doubt injurious to the development of Crash Bandicoot 2, but the company kept on, and Crash grew significantly. Naughty Dog tracked Crash’s meteoric rise with something known as the Q Score. “Superman and Batman are always up there,” Rubin said. “Mickey Mouse, whatever. In the 13 to 18-year-old range, Crash was ahead of Mario for a while. Crash had its time.”
Crash’s success also changed Naughty Dog’s relationship with its publisher, Universal, and its console partner, Sony. “[Universal] had given us money to do the first game. By the time the second game came around,” Rubin said, “Sony was funding it. We were making it. Universal was just pushing through the money. They would get it from Sony, sit on it for 90 days, and then give it to us. We would spend it.”
Sony was funding it. We were making it. Universal was just pushing through the money.
“There was really no use for Universal,” Rubin continued, “with one exception, and I have to be very clear that this is very important. Mark Cerny was an incredible talent, and we were working with him continually on these titles. But Mark didn’t really feel like he was part of Universal, either. He was vice president of Universal Interactive, but he was really at Naughty Dog.”“
Sony even started to mess around with its own, internal platformer based on the success of Crash. “Because Universal owned Crash, before Sony bought Naughty Dog, Sony thought that in case Crash went away, they needed to have an engine that could do what we were doing,” Rubin said, “and they actually internally started working on a ‘Crash Killer,’ they called it, that was eventually Harry Jalapeno, believe it or not.”Naughty Dog also ballooned in size throughout the creation of the Crash games, though it stayed small compared to today. Eight people in total made the original Crash Bandicoot. Somewhere between 16 and 19 people at any one time were toiling away on Crash 2. That grew to 23 for Crash 3, and in the low 30s for Crash Team Racing.
During Crash’s ascent, Mark Cerny left Universal and contracted with Naughty Dog directly. “So we continued to work with him, but not through Universal,” Rubin said. “By the time we got to Crash 3, there was no reason for Universal to be up in the mix. But they were making a huge amount of royalty.” Cerny is, today, best-known for being a higher-up at Sony Computer Entertainment and the chief architect of the PlayStation 4.
I came into the studio and I was like, ‘these are the guys who did Crash?’
Crash Bandicoot 2 – subtitled Cortex Strikes Back – launched in November of 1997, and it was huge. Huge enough that Naughty Dog’s growth and upward trajectory managed to bring in new, experienced talent. One of those people was an artist named Erick Pangilinan. He’s still with the company today, last acting as the Art Director on The Last of Us.“
Pangilinan was Naughty Dog employee 13, and was brought on during the development of Crash 2 in 1997. “I came from SEGA at that time,” he said. “That was when SEGA Saturn was just losing it already. SEGA was getting rid of people.” He noted that many of the higher-ups at SEGA and Sony (and elsewhere) were switching sides, and companies were “spending money on games.” Lots of it.
He interviewed all over the place – including at established developers like Square -- and Naughty Dog was the “last stop” on his tour. He remembers everyone at the company being in one room. “All the furniture didn’t match. Everyone had their tables flush around the room. There was one round table in the middle, and the carpet was filthy, because they had a dog there, and in the evening they’d throw Tommy Burgers down there and the dog would scarf them up.”He was, at first, unimpressed. “I came into the studio and I was like, ‘these are the guys who did Crash?’ Coming from SEGA, which was like a resort, this mega studio, SEGA would fly us out to parties. We’d get our own rental cars. Five of us would fly somewhere and each got their own rental car. Then we’d upgrade. And it was just to get from the airport to SEGA, all of us in these sports cars, spending money left and right. Then I went to other studios and everyone ran it the same way, movie industry style.”
By the time we got to Crash 3, there was no reason for Universal to be up in the mix. But they were making a huge amount of royalty.
“Then I went to Naughty Dog, and I saw this studio,” he continued. “My interview was, I think, at 8pm. The studio was still full, which was different from other studios. Everyone was gone by six. But this place, holy shit, they were still working… It was still buzzing. Everyone was still shouting at each other. This was a no-bullshit studio.”“
Pangilinan said he made what felt like a “counterintuitive” decision to go to a smaller, humbler studio like Naughty Dog. But he did. “[SEGA] was such a resort,” he explained. “I felt like a number. By the time they made the decision to fire everyone, you were nothing. Just a number. I worked my ass off, and that was it? ‘Yeah, see you later.’ I just didn’t understand that. I came here and it looked like family. This was the team I wanted to work with, because there was no bullshit.”
He also respected the knowledge of the people who worked there, right up to the leadership. It wasn’t common at other companies to have co-founders like Rubin and Gavin in the trenches, with all of the knowledge – and more – that their employees had. “You could go to other companies, I met all their presidents,” he said. “You could bullshit them. They wouldn’t know jack shit. But here, the bullshit won’t go very far.”
IV. A Lasting Legacy
All told, Naughty Dog created four Crash Bandicoot games, though it only had a three game contract with Universal to fulfill. The third game, Warped, and the fourth, Crash Team Racing, were released in late 1998 and late 1999, respectively, and the series continued to see great commercial and critical success. Indeed, Crash was as relevant as ever, but Naughty Dog’s relationship with Universal began to become burdensome.[Crash has] become lost in the shuffle...
“It’s unfortunate in a lot of ways that Universal then became what Universal was, and [then] Vivendi, and then eventually sold it off to Activision… [Crash has] become lost in the shuffle, because it could have been one of the great characters of all-time, based on where it was in 1998 or 1999,” Rubin said, while recounting just how popular his creation was.“It was the top of the world in terms of characters. There were Pizza Hut giveaways. The Australian Surfing Commission, their entire policy for kids’ safety was done with Crash. The TGV train going from London to Paris had Crash on it. If you got off a plane in an airport in Tokyo, there was a giant Crash room. Crash was becoming huge. Unfortunately… Universal, as a company, became less and less relevant as time went on.” Crash’s future was out of Naughty Dog’s hands; they didn’t own the character, and neither did Sony.“
CTR we also self-funded. Gave it to Sony with blockheaded characters and said, 'God, this would be a great Crash game…'
But the company still cared enough about Crash that it would proceed with passion projects on its own. Crash Team Racing was one such game. “CTR we also self-funded. Gave it to Sony with blockheaded characters and said, ‘God, this would be a great Crash game, but you know our relationship with Universal.’ So Sony went to Universal and cut a deal so that could be a Crash game.” But that ended up being the swan song of Naughty Dog’s relationship with Universal, and its time with Crash Bandicoot.“
“It was weird,” Pangilinan recalled. “We were funded by Universal. We were at the Universal lot. But you always had this feeling that Universal didn’t know what the hell to do with us. They were a movie studio. It just felt like they were passing the discs to Sony. Sony was the publisher. It was a weird relationship where we were Naughty Dog, but then who’s this Universal guy? The partner we really wanted to be with was Sony.”
“The problem was, Crash was owned by Universal,” he continued. “It was this weird situation where we didn’t know our identity. We knew we were Naughty Dog, but where did we belong? We weren’t owned by anyone. Jason and Andy ran the show.”
Industry veterans from Connie Booth to Shuhei Yoshida worked on Crash Bandicoot, but it was Mark Cerny – once again – that brought Naughty Dog out of its relationship with Universal. “Mark was the guy that held it all together,” Thompson explained. Ultimately, “He was the one that was instrumental in convincing Jason and Andy to walk away from Universal and walk away from that deal. They knew the future and the direction they wanted to go. They weren’t going to be able to do it with that partner in place.”
None of [the people at Universal] knew game design or game development. They had no idea.
Crash Team Racing would be the last Crash game Naughty Dog would work on. For the next-generation consoles on the horizon in the late-‘90s, future Crash games would be handled by other studios at the behest of the company’s actual owners – ultimately Activision – and its fall from grace would be as brutal as it was sudden. But old-school Naughty Dog employees still look back fondly on Crash Bandicoot and what he meant to the studio, to PlayStation, and to the gaming community.“
“[Universal] liked having someone who was as capable and as accomplished as Mark [Cerny] running this, allowing them to just kind of unplug. For the most part, it was their interactive motion pictures division,” Thompson said. “None of them knew game design or game development. They had no idea. They just knew that this was generating income. They knew that they had a stake in it… What they did to that franchise when Naughty Dog left it… They truly didn’t understand what they had and how they should mature that franchise and take it into the next generation… Universal was, for the most part, just a stepping stone.”“People dug it,” he noted. “People really liked the game, liked the characters. Back then, there was not a real emphasis on gritty photorealism. It was all about character-based games. Mario had benefited so much from those days, and every other classic game we could remember. I think consumer expectations for what gaming was at that time was still very bright and innocent.”
“People would take it at face value that you were playing as a bandicoot, or playing Spyro the Dragon, or Sly Cooper… But it was important to Sony, tremendously important, to have that brand identity,” Thompson said. “If you think about Sonic, that was SEGA’s and still is SEGA’s core flagship. Mario has always been there for Nintendo. We’ve never really had that one mascot. For several years, it was Crash. He was huge.”
Left disenchanted by their experience with Universal, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin floated towards the 21st century wondering what was next for the company they founded nearly two decades before. Naughty Dog created Crash Bandicoot, but it didn’t own him, or any of the games he starred in. Crash could have stayed as big as he was – and perhaps still be relevant today – if they retained even a modicum of control.
Likewise, Sony itself felt burned, not by Naughty Dog -- which delivered four high-quality, best-selling games – but by Universal, which controlled the IP. Indeed, Sony threw the weight of its money and prestige, as well as its considerable marketing machine and the name of the PlayStation itself, behind Crash. Yet by 2002, what was considered a PlayStation-exclusive would be on competing machines. Both Sony and its trusted development partners’ hands were tied, and they had no choice but to move on.
After shipping Crash Team Racing in 1999, Naughty Dog began toiling away on a concept that would ultimately become Jak & Daxter, the studio’s contribution to PlayStation 2’s impressive roster of exclusive games. But business intervened for both Naughty Dog and Sony, and before either side knew it, the parent company of the PlayStation brand and the House that Crash Bandicoot Built were on a very welcome collision course that would tether the two sides together for good.
Disclaimer: Contains Profanity
I. Going First Party
“CTR was the hardest project I’ve ever worked on,” Jason Rubin said. “Andy, my tried and true partner who had been through everything with me, was working on Jak.”“I was 20 feet away, but mentally, I was on a totally different thing,” Andy Gavin interjected.
The situation at Naughty Dog was becoming untenable as development moved from PlayStation to PlayStation 2, largely because the studio was growing, the money necessary to make games was increasing, and the pressure on the two founders of the studio was mounting. It was at this time that they considered, for the first time, selling the company.
Kelly looked at me and Andy and said, ‘so when are you guys selling the company?’
“Around [the time CTR came out], we went to Tokyo. We were sitting there with [Game Informer’s] Andy McNamara, Andy Reiner… and Kelly Flock. Kelly used to run SCEA, basically. We were really drunk in the Lexington Queen at maybe four or five in the morning. Maybe six in the morning. I remember it being light when we came out.”“
The five men were drinking overpriced Jack and Cokes, talking about the state of the industry, Sony’s and PlayStation’s future, and, inevitably, what would come of Naughty Dog.
“Kelly looked at me and Andy and said, ‘so when are you guys selling the company?’” Rubin recalls. “And I said, ‘why would we sell the company?’ We were on top of the world, right? He said, ‘because you made the number one game. There’s no where to go but down from here.’”“That kind of hit me with the alcohol,” Rubin continued. “And maybe it was the fact that CTR was killing me. But there was actually kind of a point here. You sell things at their high, right? That didn’t necessarily mean we won’t be able to do more, but things were getting harder. Games were getting a lot more expensive… It got to the point where you couldn’t afford to fund your own game as a developer.”
Moving from PlayStation to PlayStation 2 hit Rubin and Gavin like a ton of bricks. They were accustomed to funding their own projects, going all the way back to the 1980s, but it just wasn’t possible anymore. Jak & Daxter required $14 million to make – a fairly paltry sum by today’s standards – but that doesn’t take into account that Gavin and Rubin each put $2.25 million into its development, accounting for about a third of Jak’s overall cost.
There are very few independent developers that are really killing it in the way that Andy and I were killing it in the Crash days.
“It was very clear that it was getting out of hand. So we couldn’t fund games ourselves,” Rubin admitted. “We were going to become more reliant on publishers. Once you become reliant on publishers, being independent becomes less cool.”“
Rubin threw out the names of still-successful independent developers like Epic and Valve, but “There are very few independent developers that are really killing it in the way that Andy and I were killing it in the Crash days.” Cash cows like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans, he opines, were simply not possible back then.
“You were either on console or PC, and all those games were going to be $15 million and up. So we saw that coming. We knew we were going to be close to the publisher. We had an incredible relationship with Sony…” Rubin said. “Sony always let us chart our own course, always let us make the games we wanted to make, and they paid us really well as a company.”
“So what was the difference for us?” he later continued. “[It was] taking risk off the table and getting in bed with such a good partner, when we knew that in the future we wouldn’t be able to develop on our own anyway. Sitting there and realizing that, yeah, there’s nowhere to go but down, and even being number one wasn’t going to be as good as it was from a financial standpoint, because of where the industry was going. It all just clicked.”Gavin jumped in. “Also, I had this feeling. Each game was like riding a brand new rocket ship that was patched together with duct tape. But it’s under 200,000 G’s of thrust. You’re strapping duct tape on. Is it gonna hold? They’re all like that. It’s still like that. You have this feeling that, like with the rocket, it’s utterly catastrophic. If one piece of tape flips off and one tile goes, you’re going to [explode like Space Shuttle] Challenger. It’s all over.”
“Also, as the number of employees grows, there’s this sense of restraint. You’re like their parents in a way… There was this crushing sense of responsibility for them. You gotta keep it all together. If we [make a] mistake or one flop, the whole thing is gonna just fireball. The sale [to Sony] takes that risk off and buys them security.”
Gavin and Rubin listened to Flock in Japan, but were so confident they’d end up holding onto Naughty Dog that they bet him a case of Lafite-Rothschild wine – worth thousands upon thousands of dollars – that they wouldn’t sell. “He collected,” Gavin said with a laugh.
Naughty Dog was sold to Sony while Jak & Daxter was still in pre-production, as the studio was still convincing its publisher that this new game was a good idea worth funding. “They’re saying to us, ‘we love it. We want to work with you guys forever,’” Rubin said. “’But here’s the thing. Look what happened to Crash… We don’t control it. We put a huge amount of marketing into Crash. We made Crash into this massive thing… We’re not going to do that again with your title that you own and watch it go to a competing platform out of our control. So we want to work with you, but we want to have that control.’”
This is probably one of the most successful acquisitions, probably in both directions, in the history of the game business.
Gavin and Rubin answered, in kind, that there would be “financial ramifications” for such a move, because if they didn’t own Jak & Daxter, they’d lose licensing rights, the ability to do a movie, and more. The only way Sony owning Jak & Daxter made sense to Naughty Dog’s co-founders and Sony itself was if Sony simply purchased the studio outright.“
“They said, ‘write up a document with what you think the company’s worth and we’ll talk about it.’ Unfortunately, when I wrote up that document, they accepted it without negotiation,” Rubin explained with a laugh. “Which tells me that either they’re as generous as I always thought Sony is, or I underbid. Based on what’s happened, I underbid, but who knows?”
“This is probably one of the most successful acquisitions, probably in both directions, in the history of the game business,” Gavin said. “Here it is... years later, and they’re still making world class games. It’s even gotten better. They’re still exclusive. The same basic management is here. The corporate culture is intact and not absorbed. It’s so frequent that these things just all fall apart a few years later.”
“See EA,” Rubin said, referencing the many closed, discarded, or forever altered studios the massive publisher left in its wake.
“There’s just nothing left,” Gavin continued. But with Sony, Naughty Dog didn’t become weaker. It became stronger, more solid, and more reliable, especially because a lot of the people running Sony’s PlayStation brand at the time – like Kaz Hirai – were known quantities to Naughty Dog, and vice-versa. Shuhei Yoshida was also an intermediary between the two sides. Even the lawyers, marketing people, and PR were familiar enough to Naughty Dog for such a move to be comfortable.“The finances Sony can put behind a game took away a lot of the risk and the fear off of management,” Rubin admitted. “That allowed management to take risks. Not crazy risks, but risks that they couldn’t take with their own money… That’s why this company, unlike a lot of other companies out there, is still creating content that’s so different, unique, and individual. They have both the backing of a publisher with big pockets, and the freedom to do what they think is right without a lot of second-guessing from a marketing department or from external producers or some sort of oversight committee or anything like that.”
“This company still operates like an indie, but it has the power of Sony behind it. We could see that was going to happen, so selling wasn’t scary to us.”
But [Sony] trust[s] us. They’re like, ‘oh, you’re not going to go scratch my Ferrari. Go ahead and drive it. I know you’ll bring it back nice.'
Gavin and Rubin officially sold Naughty Dog to Sony in early 2001 for an undisclosed amount of money. And true to the co-founders’ word, very little has changed at the studio since that time, according to those who were there for the transition.“
“[Sony] got much more involved with the company, but they were still fairly hands-off in comparison to a lot of other companies,” Naughty Dog’s cinematics lead Josh Scherr said. “They knew that we had been successful with the Crash games, and they didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.”
“As soon as I started [working at] Naughty Dog, everyone was like, ‘oh, you’re working for Sony,’” Environment Artist Reuben Shah remarked. “But Jason Rubin, when I started, said ‘No, you’re working for Naughty Dog. We’re a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony.’ That’s how we still treat it, and I think that’s how they still treat us. They kind of leave us alone. We’re able to produce what we can.”
“We’re like their kid, basically,” Art Director Erick Pangilinan said.
“Right. But they trust us. They’re like, ‘oh, you’re not going to go scratch my Ferrari. Go ahead and drive it. I know you’ll bring it back nice,’” Shah answered, laughing. “We usually do, right?”
II. Hero and Sidekick
At its core, Jak & Daxter was designed with the spirit of Crash Bandicoot in mind. But it was meant to be bigger, better, and more open-ended. It was also meant to be accessible. That was a key tenet to Jak’s success. But a mixture of old talent that worked on Crash Bandicoot and new talent that would be culled from other places both inside and outside of the industry would be required to help make the idea into reality.Josh Scherr, who came to Naughty Dog in February of 2001, was a member of the core team that built Jak, and remains at Naughty Dog to this day. But at the time, he had just entered the gaming space from the feature animation industry. It was when he was working on a pitch for a 3D Mighty Mouse film for Nickelodeon that he found himself looking for a job at the studio that made Crash Bandicoot.After taking a grueling day-long exam to test his animating chops (“I was sweating like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News,” he recalled), he found himself hired. He was Naughty Dog employee #33.
“In terms of directive, one thing we were trying to do internally was that we wanted to create a title that not only had broad appeal to many different age groups, but also to many different cultures. To that end, that’s where a lot of the anime stylings of the characters were coming into play.” In addition to its Japanese-styled art, Jak’s name – which is South African – was originally suggested by Scherr, and is another example of the series’ multicultural slant. “One thing that wasn’t in place when I arrived were the character’s names,” he said. “All the art everywhere just said ‘Hero and Sidekick.’”
“It’s funny,” longtime Sony producer Sam Thompson said when asked about the origin of the series. “For Jak & Daxter, it was always Jak & Daxter. The character hadn’t been completely locked-in. The design, the ears, things like that. Then what Daxter was. But in my recollection, Jason and Andy, they always knew. Everybody knew. They wanted to do a third-person open world action adventure game that’s entirely character-based. This is what they wanted. It was never something that they wavered with.”
I was sweating like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.
“I remember early on, even the first concept videos, Jason was so passionate about the size and scope of the world,” he continued. “You could tell it was connected to his design philosophies with Crash. It was just this extension of that current philosophy, blown to a whole new proportion. You had this wonderland of tools and toys you could play with. It was their version of a sandbox. And it worked out really well.”“
Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells expanded on these ideas. “We knew we wanted to do a character action game. I remember spending some time at the dog park with Jason [Rubin] kicking around ideas. We were inspired by the success of Final Fantasy at the time, the Japanese influence. That was one of the big things. We wanted to replicate the success that Crash had in Japan, because back then it was a huge part of the market.”
“A lot of the stuff we were working with at the time was trying to combine the western and the Japanese influences to create a new game. I think that’s where a lot of the inspiration came from. And also trying to hit the different demographics. We were going to have a teenage boy, but then we wanted a sidekick for some humor. We were piecing together bits of the formula from Crash that worked and then turning it into a free-roaming 3D action platformer. It was rough.”
Naughty Dog first caught wind of PlayStation 2 when making Crash Bandicoot 3. “The PS2 was starting to be developed and we were talking to Sony about what it would be capable of,” Wells recounted. “The [SEGA] Dreamcast was out and we were excited about what we were hearing. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on hardware.”“I think because of the success of Crash, they wanted to get us the earliest prototype PS2 hardware they could,” he continued. “At the time, they couldn’t even import the machines. It couldn’t get through customs. It was this supercomputer. It had to be searched and made sure that you’re not using it for nefarious purposes or something. They actually had to sneak it in. They sent us to the airport and we had to drive over into some weird warehouse and pick it up and take it back to the office.”
Difficulty arose during development due to the jump from PlayStation to PlayStation 2, which was extreme, according to Thompson. “You’re dealing with a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,” he noted. “You don’t have final tech in some cases, you don’t have final firmware. You’re dealing with a brand new engine. You’re dealing with the PS2 architecture, which is extremely advanced compared to the PS1. You have larger team sizes, larger budget. The scope of the project is 100 times what [Crash Bandicoot 3:] Warped was.”
It was really hard to get the engine up and running on the PS2.
“It was really hard to get the engine up and running on the PS2,” Wells later said. “We thought we could continue to do games every year like we had done on the PS1. We thought we could have the game come out a year after CTR. Six months in, we’re like, ‘okay, we can barely even render this thing at one hertz.’ At that point we knew [Jak & Daxter] was going to be a two-year project.”“
Indeed, Jak & Daxter’s second year of development wasn’t exactly smooth, either. The game ran poorly, and the team, according to Wells, “was trying to find what was fun about [the game]. It’s very different going from a linear game like Crash to exploring a fully free-roaming 3D camera game.”
Technology aside, further difficulty was met due to the studio’s desire to tell a more meaningful, interesting story in Jak & Daxter, something Naughty Dog actually wanted to do with Crash Bandicoot, but couldn’t due to technical limitations.
“When we were designing Crash, we had animated sequences that would drop right into the game… We utterly failed to get any of that into the game because the hardware couldn’t handle it and we didn’t have the budget or the time to do it,” Jason Rubin said. “But the idea was always there. As time went on with Crash, more and more plot. When we got to Jak, we said ‘now is our time.’ Jak 1 has plot at the beginning, actually in-game movie stuff. This was revolutionary at the time.”“This was the first attempt to introduce more of a story into the games,” Scherr said. “The Crash games had stories, but they were fairly simple, shall we say. ‘So-and-So’s been kidnapped! Dr. So-and-So had done this again! Save girl, or save world.’ That kind of thing. [We] wanted to try to get a more interesting mythos developed with the Precursors and the world and the eco and everything like that. To do that, [the powers that be] decided that they wanted to use cutscenes.”
Scherr was up to the task, and he helped shape and guide the way Jak & Daxter’s story was told. “One of the things I noticed when I first got in is that… The animation was great, but they were still very video gamey, and by that I mean there was no real cinematic language being used. Essentially, everybody was talking directly into the camera. The camera would stay on them until they finished talking, and then they would switch to the other person who was talking and do exactly the same thing over and over.”
The guy who was the sound designer at the time basically came right out and said how he felt the game was terrible and how none of us knew what we were doing...
“I started not to do that,” he continued. “I started trying to do some actual cuts and moves and things like that. Some people thought it was cool, and some people thought it was actually making it feel like less of a video game, in a bad way. ‘This is a video game convention. Characters talk to you directly through the screen.’ That was actually the source of some little fights I had in C&Cs with some people.”“
C&Cs, in Naughty Dog nomenclature, are Comments and Criticisms, and they persisted from the beginning of the Crash Bandicoot era all the way through Jak X. “After the business of [any given] company meeting was taken care of,” Scherr described, “we went around the table, and if anybody has anything to say about anything, this was your chance to openly speak about it.” These meetings, as you may imagine, weren’t always nice.
“I remember my very first C&C meeting,” Scherr recalled. “The guy who was the sound designer at the time basically came right out and said how he felt the game was terrible and how none of us knew what we were doing and we all really needed to rethink the entire approach. That was an interesting introduction to the Naughty Dog corporate culture,” Scherr said, laughing. “He left about two months later.”
Scherr’s vision for Jak won out, but there were some issues. “You go back and look at the first Jak, you’ll notice that the cutscenes are very much a mishmash of these styles. Most of them were mine, the more cinematic language-y ones, and in others they’re just talking to you.”And then there’s the small matter of release timing. Jak & Daxter was delayed by a month in order to clean the game up.
“We had to delay the game past Thanksgiving [2001],” Wells said. “It was a really awkward time to ship the game. We wanted to get out before Christmas, but we needed that extra three or four weeks to ship the thing. It was a scary project. But it was a reflection of Naughty Dog’s culture. We won’t ship a game that we’re not proud of. We won’t ship a game that doesn’t hit the mark on all the different disciplines.”
“And when you see the end result, a few more weeks made a huge difference,” Naughty Dog Co-President Christophe Balestra interjected. “It would be a shame not to be able to polish the game… Evan was pointing out, ‘everyone will forget that we were five weeks late.’ Five weeks out of three years, it’s not that much. But if we ship a game that’s not good, that’s gonna stay forever. That was the kind of decision we made.”
It would be a shame not to be able to polish the game… if we ship a game that’s not good, that’s gonna stay forever.
Sam Thompson elaborated further. “Obviously, when you’re working on something new, you’re iterating a lot. You’re losing probably 70 percent of what you make on the cutting room floor. Either you had to rewrite it or you’ve gone with a different rendering solution or a different code solution. The game mechanics have changed, the AI has changed, these sequences are no longer valid. It happened with The Last of Us. It happened with Uncharted. It happens all the time.”“
“You build something [and] the current scope of design says ‘this,’” he continued. “But by the time you get there, you probably built it five times over, and then you realize it’s not going to work in the context of the story, or you just don’t feel like it’s where it needs to be. This whole thing goes, and then you have to figure out how you connect the dots to make up for losing that.”
Thompson specifically discussed the original Jak & Daxter’s development, identifying it as “hectic” and noting that the original schedule was slipping through their fingers. “The Precursor Bot, the last boss fight in the game, I believe went in 48 hours before final,” he said, chuckling. “I think we had a day to tune it before it went into the can.”
Because of the fact that games back then were more sequentially developed, as opposed to being developed around the needs of the publisher, marketing, PR, and other groups, Thompson suggests that the beginning of Jak & Daxter may feel tighter and more deliberate than the latter parts of the game, since sequential development allows more fine-tuning on what’s done first. “But it works,” he said. The ramping of the game’s difficulty towards the end, perhaps a product of stunted development, “feels natural,” Thompson concluded.Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy launched exclusively on PlayStation 2 on December 3, 2001 in North America, and it was a home run for Sony’s new console around the world. Indeed, unlike many American games today, Jak & Daxter – like Crash Bandicoot before it – was a huge hit in Japan. But the franchise would start to evolve, beginning with its sequel, due to changing trends in the industry that necessitated a new look at what Naughty Dog was putting out.
“Jak was revolutionary for us,” Thompson proudly noted. “And then the next year and a half, we started to see titles like God of War and Killzone… Everything started to change. You had Grand Theft Auto III coming out. All of a sudden, it’s about real worlds, photorealism, gritty stories, a lot more violence.” Jak & Daxter had none of that.
“Near the end of Jak 1 was when Grand Theft Auto III came out,” Scherr said. “While we were trying to finish the game, we were all sitting around in the lounge trying to rack up a five-star rating as quickly as possible. If you played Jak II, that set off some light bulbs in Jason’s head. Jak II, we really went all out in terms of the ambition. Everybody pushed everything.”
The team began to formulate ideas for a sequel as soon as the original shipped, as they retreated as a group to Mammoth, California for a much-needed vacation. In addition to its added scope, Naughty Dog wanted to emphasize storytelling in Jak II even more than it did in the first game. “I wanted to start pushing the cinematic language in scenes,” Scherr notes. “Again, there was a bit of a fight at the beginning, but I think once everybody started seeing how much more effective it made some of the scenes, I think everybody started following along, which I think ultimately helped the project.”
The cinematic of Jak being tortured, as the camera cranes up and all that stuff… we were really making movies now.
Music and sound were also important, according to Scherr. “You go back and play Jak 1, there would be the most dramatic scene in the game playing, near the end, with Gol and Maia confronting Jak at the citadel. But what’s in the background is whatever music happened to be playing in the level. It’ll be, ‘I am going to destroy you all!” and in the background is [calypso music sounds], or whatever the music is.”“
“Yeah, that undercuts it a bit,” Scherr continued. “There’s not additional sound. There’s nothing else to help sell it. There were more, shall we say, spirited conversations with Jason about needing to spend some more money on this stuff.”
“It’s just kind of funny,” he continued, “because I remember having an argument with Jason about the opening of Jak II where the giant Precursor warp gate thing goes up in the sky, and the thing is flying out. He was watching it and saying, ‘this is all happening way too slow. This isn’t exciting.’ And I was just like, ‘get some music in this. Get some audio in this. I promise it will make those [issues] disappear.’”
“That was an abbreviated version of the very long and loud argument I had with him over that particular thing,” Scherr said, laughing. “At the end of it, we put it all in and everything started falling into place. We just continued to push that thing. One of the big philosophies we were trying to go for there was story as reward… You get through this particular section of the game, you get to see more about how the story unfolds.”
Taylor Kurosaki, who left Naughty Dog after the original Crash Bandicoot and returned to the company in 2004, jumped in. “The cinematic of Jak being tortured, as the camera cranes up and all that stuff… we were really making movies now.”“With Jak II, it’s almost written like a movie,” Andy Gavin said. “The story integration got a really serious push. It has an elaborate plot and all these in-game cutscenes. They’re not movie stuff, not FMV. They’re just a part of the game. We tried to interweave it with the game so you’re really playing the story. It’s not some weird multimedia thing.”
Jak II launched on October 14, 2003 in North America. “There’s a fair amount of debate as to the quality of the final game. I know some people love its scope and the breadth of all the different activities you can do. Other people feel that it was just way too spread out, lost a lot of the charm, or lost a lot of the platforming stuff, anyway,” Scherr admits. “I think one thing everybody can agree on, though, is that that game is just way too fucking hard.”
The sales were horrendous for Jak II in Japan.
Unlike the debate over the quality of the game, there’s no debate on how it performed, at least in Japan, where Naughty Dog previously found a strange level of success for a western developer. “Jason felt strongly that we should make the move to a darker play in Jak II, which completely alienated Japan,” Thompson recalled. “The sales were horrendous for Jak II in Japan.”“
“But that was the decision we had to make,” Thompson conceded. “Jason and Andy specifically – and this is with all of the stakeholders at Sony buying in as well – they had to mature this franchise if they wanted it to compete long term.”
Jak 3 -- which launched barely a year after Jak II did, in November, 2004 – was a reflection of the series’ continued evolution. Just like Grand Theft Auto III heavily influenced Jak II’s direction, Jak 3 was influenced by another Rockstar game, Smuggler’s Run. “Jason was playing that, and he’s like, ‘hmm,’” Scherr remembers. “All of a sudden, there’s a lot of driving in buggies and desert sands in Jak 3.”
“We like our influences,” he admits. “We look at what some other games are doing, and if we feel it’s appropriate for what we’re doing, we’ll see if we can incorporate it and put our own spin on it. That was also kind of the philosophy on Jak.”
III. An Unusual Culture
During the Jak & Daxter trilogy’s development, the size of Naughty Dog continued to balloon. As we already know, the growing size of the staff and expectations of their production caused Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin to sell the company to Sony, but throughout the trials and tribulations of PlayStation 2 development, the corporate culture remained very much the same. It was loose and unorthodox. It was – and is –a single-minded meritocracy, but one with its own, unique flair.Lead Environment Artist Tate Mosesian learned this first-hand when he came to Naughty Dog in 2002, during the time Jak II was under development. Mosesian graduated from art school in 1991 and immediately jumped into the game industry, working for the likes of Disney and Western Technology, and later for Capcom and Crystal Dynamics.By 1999, Mosesian found himself as one of 11 founding members of Sony Santa Monica, the Sony-owned studio that is today best known for the God of War franchise. “Probably seven or eight people from [989 Studios, where he was at the time], and then maybe another four or five, started the Santa Monica Studio,” he recalled. He worked on some projects that never saw the light of day before eventually scoring a job at Naughty Dog.
Santa Monica was “going to start working on this ridiculous gladiator game that I had no interest in working on,” he said, laughing. “Then come to find out three years later that it was God of War. But I was okay, because I had shipped Jak II and Jak 3. That was some consolation.”
What impressed Mosesian the most is that Naughty Dog got things done. “To be quite honest, they shipped games,” he said. “When you put two, three years into a game, you want to see it on the shelves. You want to be able to tell your parents and your friends to go down to Toys ‘R’ Us and say, ‘I did that.’”
“There was something tangible when you walked through the door and sat down to start working,” he later said. “There was never any doubt that what you were working on was going to be finished and it was going to be good. I can’t really explain it. I just came in and was assigned a level. That level had made consistent progressions and everything was very professional regarding the production of the game.”
[I was] going to start working on this ridiculous gladiator game that I had no interest in working on. Then come to find out three years later that it was God of War.
Other things weren’t quite as professional. Quite the opposite, actually. “Everything else was total chaos,” he admits. “The studio itself was not what I expected at all from a company like Naughty Dog. But the work ethic and the focused direction very much was. If you walked into that studio back then, you would scratch your head and say, ‘this is the studio that made Crash Bandicoot?’”“
The studio was “disheveled” during the Jak & Daxter period, according to Mosesian. “There were a lot of people strewn around. There wasn’t any real organization… It just didn’t seem like that triple-A studio from first impression.” Mosesian didn’t even have a computer waiting for him on his first day. On the second day, one was at his desk, but it was covered in food and stains.
But the lack of a stringent corporate culture didn’t bother Mosesian. “Well, yes, it would have been nice to not have to clean spaghetti sauce off of my keyboard,” he humorously admitted, “but it was nice to be working in a studio that did such great work, but also maintained this crazy garage mentality. This bunch of guys just working on something awesome. That was actually really cool.”The unique horizontal structure was also something that Mosesian needed to become accustomed to. “While there was a flat hierarchy, there was a king. That king set the law. Then everybody else filtered into the positions of leadership… We benefitted from the pros of having leaders running departments, but didn’t have to suffer from the meetings and bureaucracy and paperwork.”
“Things just got done. It was because things got done that I was never worried. The first day I started working, my sense was that this was a machine. It’s got one goal, to make an awesome game and deliver it on time. Everyone who needs to know what they need to know knows it. You also got the sense, very quickly, who were the people to go to when you needed to know something. It made it much nicer. There was no intimidation factor. There was no knocking on doors. All doors were open. The presidents, the owners and founders of the company, were working just as hard as I was, if not harder.”
...it would have been nice to not have to clean spaghetti sauce off of my keyboard, but it was nice to be working in a studio that did such great work.
Art Director Erick Pangilinan described this do-good-work culture as something that’s embedded in anyone who works at Naughty Dog and managed to survive. Indeed, “crunch” – the time developers work insane hours to finish a project – is part of Naughty Dog’s DNA, for better or for worse.“
“I think we got famous in the industry for crunch,” he said. “It’s true. In a negative way, maybe. Everyone I talk to tells me that everyone at Naughty Dog has to crunch and work really hard. That’s true. But it’s also your passion for excellence. You have to make that sacrifice. There is a balance with family and stuff, but the people who go here commit to that. You want to make the game an excellent game. That’s why you’re here.”
Interestingly, while crunch is part of the culture, it’s not forced upon anyone. Yet, everyone stays and crunches regardless. “We don’t mandate crunch,” he said. “I personally don’t force people to crunch. You’re here on your own.”
Environment Artist Reuben Shah jumped into the conversation. “I’ve never gotten an e-mail saying ‘you better be here these days or these hours!’”
“You’ll never hear that,” Pangilinan answered. “’Come in on Saturday’ or something like that. You’ll never hear that. Everyone is here by choice. I guess it’s also peer pressure, knowing where your level stands and knowing that the guy next to you has another level and it’s looking amazing. It’s more the feeling that you don’t want to let the team down. It’s all about ownership.”“We give a pair – a modeler and a texture artist – one level. That’s theirs. They’ll be judged on that level. So there’s tremendous pressure on those guys to make their level awesome. You don’t want to be that guy: ‘Oh, this is an amazing game, except that one [level],’ or, ‘Oh, it’s made by that guy and that guy, it’s gonna suck.’ You don’t want to be that guy. Everyone has this pressure. ‘Oh my God, I’m here at Naughty Dog, I can’t let these guys down. They won’t eat lunch with me. They’ll talk shit about me.’”
“You just want to be part of that team. You want to be part of that elite,” he continued. “That’s the only bragging rights you have, because as you probably noticed, we don’t have a strong hierarchy. There’s not a lot of vertical progression in your career, except ownership of what you’ve done. It’s the amount of work that you can contribute and give to the game. That’s your portfolio.”
“That’s the reason why there’s very little politics, too. We don’t emphasize that structure. We emphasize what you do in the game. It’s all about focusing on work and what you’ve done and how the team sees you as a resource. That’s how you’re measured. How important are you to this company?”
Oh my God, I’m here at Naughty Dog, I can’t let these guys down. They won’t eat lunch with me. They’ll talk shit about me.
“It’s a testament to the games we make,” Shah interjected. “We typically make pretty good games, and I think that comes from the passion and self-empowerment we have, to make ourselves better artists, better designers, better programmers, to push the ball forward and make innovation happen every day.”“
One thing that surprised Shah when he began at Naughty Dog was the accessibility of everyone in the company, from the highest people all the way down to the lowest.
“Early on, I remember I had to go talk to Andy Gavin, the lead programmer, the second-in-command with Jason. [Someone] said, ‘just go talk to him.’ Something about the blend shapes. We needed to get blend shapes working in the game. I’m like, ‘really? I’m gonna go talk to him?’ I felt stupid. This guy is like the smartest motherfucker in the world, and I had a one-on-one with him. It was amazing.”
“Because you’re used to structure, you’re used to hierarchy,” Pangilinan suggested.
“Exactly,” Shah answered. “I wasn’t supposed to go to The Boss. I was supposed to go to my lead or my supervisor and take it up and maybe I’ll hear something back in a week. No, it was that day. Go talk to him now. We have to figure it out today. It was in the game by later that night. That was really refreshing. That’s how it works? Awesome.”
“You compare that to a lot of the corporate places around here,” Pangilinan said. “You could get fired for something like that.”
“Right,” Shah responded, laughing. “’Why is Employee #38 talking to me?’”Josh Scherr also recalls looseness during the Jak & Daxter years, an environment that stressed creative freedom. “I know the animators loved it,” he said, referencing this ability to do what you thought was best for the project. “Essentially total creative freedom to make their own little mini-movie… for the most part, everyone had free rein to be creative on every aspect of their production. I know for a lot of the animators, Jak was the golden era in that regard. It was all keyframe. There was no motion capture. You had that freedom to create your own stuff.”
Audio Director Bruce Swanson also came to Naughty Dog from outside of the industry, and was equally staggered by its unique culture. He started at the studio in 2002. “This is the first and only actual video game studio job I’ve ever had,” he noted. Before Naughty Dog, he worked in the more traditional realm of television and film.
“At the time that I met some of the Naughty Dog people, I was working at Warner Bros. on the lot in Burbank. Naughty Dog would come over there frequently to use the facility, use the ADR stage, the foley stage, to get sound design and that kind of thing.” Swanson befriended a lot of the Naughty Dog staff from the Crash Bandicoot days, and it would help him get a job there later on.
“At one point – I think it was over the summer – I got a call from Jason Rubin, and he said, ‘hey, how would like to actually work at a video game company?’ And I said, ‘uh, I don’t know, how would I?’” Swanson laughed. “But he made it sound really great. It was an interesting challenge, because he says, ‘look, you get to come here and make it up. You get to make up how it’s going to work.’ That was appealing to me.”
I know for a lot of the animators, Jak was the golden era... You had that freedom to create your own stuff.
“It’s structured,” he continued, “and there’s plenty of opportunity to be creative, but I could tell this was sort of an emerging industry. It had been going for quite a while before then… The production values in the games were starting to get closer to things that were like animation or film. So it seemed like it might be an interesting challenge. I went for it.”“
According to Swanson, it was the uncanny ability of Naughty Dog’s leadership at the time to find just the right people to come into a culture that, by all accounts, is a strange and demanding one. “They’re really great at picking people that are fairly autonomous or fairly self-starting. I had to learn what they do, but it didn’t vary so greatly from what I was already accustomed to that it was that big a thing.”
This self-starting, hard-working, anything-goes garage culture may have persisted at Naughty Dog through the Jak & Daxter era – as it does to this day – but one thing had to change: its leadership. Towards the end of Jak & Daxter’s run, the two founders of the company would seek their exit, and find two very talented and capable men to take their place and continue Naughty Dog’s tried-and-true traditions.
IV. Heavy is the Head
Today, Naughty Dog is run by two men, but their names aren’t Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin. Instead, the power at the top is split between Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra, two industry veterans that have been leading the charge since the days when Uncharted was in its embryonic planning stages. They are known as Co-Presidents.Gavin and Rubin are the ones responsible for hiring the men that would ultimately replace them, but their meteoric trajectory wasn’t by design. Both Wells and Balestra were smart and talented, but no one knew just how smart and how talented they were until they were at Naughty Dog, in the trenches, toiling away on the Jak & Daxter series and impressing just about everyone they came into contact with.
“I’ve been doing this for half my life now. I started [in the industry] when I was 20. Maybe I shouldn’t put this on the record, but now I’m 40-years-old,” Wells said, chuckling. His extensive talent and experience aside, the story about how Wells found himself in the gaming industry is one of the great stories of the industry. “It’s one of those breaks into the industry that you can only dream of,” he admits.“I was playing games all summer long. I went to Blockbuster and rented games. I was in college. This was my freshman year. Just playing as many games as I possibly could. I finished Toe Jam & Earl, which was a feat in itself. A pretty hard game to finish. The credits roll, and I see that the first name up there is Mark Voorsanger.”
“That’s a pretty uncommon name, and I happened to be on the same gymnastics team as a Conrad Voorsanger. He was in the gym the next day, and I asked him, ‘do you have a brother named Mark?’ ‘Yeah, I do.’ ‘Does he make video games?’ ‘Yeah, Toe Jam & Earl.’ ‘Wow, I just finished his game. I loved it.’ I was interested in some summer work, so I said, ‘can I get his number and contact him?’ I made the call, and sure enough, they were working on the sequel.”
It’s one of those breaks into the industry that you can only dream of.
“They needed some help doing level design,” he continued. “I drove up to Novato [California] and interviewed with him and his partner, Greg Johnson. I got super lucky. They gave me the gig. That was my first break. I worked all summer, commuting from Palo Alto to Novato. I got my first game published that summer. That was the foot in the door.”“
Wells didn’t stop there. After his time at Johnson Voorsanger Productions, he found himself receiving help from folks at Toys For Bob – today known best for the Skylanders games – in getting a job at Crystal Dynamics. Wells worked on the PlayStation game Gex while finishing his college degree.
Christophe Balestra’s journey to Naughty Dog is a bit more straight-forward. He co-founded and owned a small studio called Rayland Interactive, located in Europe. “I started working on the Atari ST, and then the Amiga, and then the PC,” he recounted. “That’s where I started learning, working on projects and just learning programming. After that, it was an obvious thing to do, to start working on video games.”
His intelligence and drive allowed him to learn a number of different disciplines integral to the creation of games. “It was good experience. I was pretty much the only programmer. Physics, tools, whatever. That’s how I got into video games.”Rubin and Gavin found Wells and Balestra in different ways, and at different times. “I had only barely heard of [Naughty Dog],” Wells admits, talking about how he first came across their name when working on 3DO titles, and hearing about Naughty Dog’s lone 3DO game, Way of the Warrior.
“Then we were working on the sequel to Gex,” he continued. “It was a 3D platformer. Right around that same time, we started seeing rumors about this game coming out called Crash Bandicoot. I saw some screenshots and looking at the graphics, we were like, ‘Oh my god, how are they doing this? This can’t be the same hardware we’re working on. This is amazing.’ Then, when it came out, it blew up, of course.”
“Right around that time, [I] started talking to Jason and Andy about maybe coming and joining their team. It was an explosive start, going from Way of the Warrior to Crash Bandicoot. They surprised everybody with their technical chops. It was an intriguing proposal to come work for them.” It took a couple of years for Wells – along with his friend, Danny Chan – to agree to go work for Naughty Dog in 1998.
Balestra’s route to Naughty Dog was markedly different. “I had worked for a British company that had some offices in France, making games. The experience didn’t go so well,” he admitted. “They asked me to go to London and start my own team there. I didn’t like London. I didn’t want to move there. At the same time, I was playing Jak & Daxter and saying, ‘holy shit, this is amazing, all the stuff they could draw on the screen.’ I really enjoyed the game.”
Oh my god, how are they doing this? This can’t be the same hardware we’re working on. This is amazing.
“I started going on the Naughty Dog website. At the same time, they had a bunch of videos explaining how they were doing things. I was like, ‘I want to work with those guys.’ I felt a connection. I had no idea where they were. The United States? I didn’t know if it was California or Santa Monica. It could have been anywhere. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want to move to London. If I had to move somewhere in the world, I wanted it to be where those guys were. I sent in my resume and they called me back a day or two later. That’s how it started.” Balestra began at Naughty Dog in 2002.“
It didn’t take long for Gavin and Rubin to figure out that they had two dynamic, valuable, and talented people on their hands, and even though they started at Naughty Dog several years apart, the seed was set when they were both there together. These were the guys that were going to take Naughty Dog over and allow the founders to finally bow out after two decades at the helm of the company, going all the way back to the days of JAM Software: Jason and Andy’s Magic.
“Within a year [of starting], Evan was already a senior person on any project we were working on,” Rubin said. “Basically second to me, in terms of directing stuff, rather than programming. But immediately, the talent was obviously there.”
Gavin elaborated. “I remember specifically, Evan had come in and he had asked how to do something on Crash 3. I’d given him five minutes of instructions in this difficult script file that I never expected him to absorb, because I had given the same instructions at length to a zillion people and no one ever absorbed it. Evan comes back an hour later and he’s done this huge amount of stuff in it already. He was just asking some refining questions. I’m like, ‘whoa.’ I went over to Jason and said, ‘you know, I think Evan might be the find here. He got this.’”“There were a couple of programmers that I had shown this [other file to],” Gavin said. “I had shown that to a couple of the programmers at great length and half of them hadn’t picked it up. In five minutes or whatever, Evan picked it up, because Evan is really smart. He’s a very big picture thinker.”
Gavin later noted that “Evan was what we used to call a Crack Filler… He would do any part of the game. He might not do some art or whatever, but he would help make anything better. He would go to the people who did that part and make sure they got it done and smooth it over and make a decision on it. That, in some ways, is one of the most valuable skills on a lot of projects.”
Sam Thompson had more to say on Wells’ talents. “Evan Wells is probably the single most talented guy I’ve met. His ability to speak to multiple disciplines. He’s the consummate co-president, executive producer. I couldn’t imagine having anyone different. He can speak to any discipline on the floor, knowledgably, in a way that they can understand. He can speak to any code aspect, any design aspect. Complete understanding of every system, subsystem. It’s just incredible.”
Similar stories were told about Balestra. “Christophe came to us as a very junior programmer,” Rubin said. “He came from France. One of the lower salaries at the time. He was a very junior person. He came along with a more senior programmer, also coincidentally from France – we hired them as a package – who had a higher salary. Two years later, Christophe was second in charge under Andy. Again, the instant ability to do the work.”
Evan Wells is probably the single most talented guy I’ve met.
“Within a week, it was obvious” how talented he was, Gavin interjected.“
“He could both do the work he needed to do and manage, which are two different tasks,” Rubin continued. “This is a talent-based company. There’s no seniority here. You either do your work and you get the position or you don’t do your work and you’re out. Nobody would say, ‘he’s more junior than me, he’s younger than me.’”
“The other programmer that came with Christophe… I remember, the same day Andy promoted Christophe, when I was in a meeting where Andy told him he was going to be number two in the company, and his salary more than doubled. It was night and day, because he was now a senior person at one of the best game companies in the country. That same day, we had to fire the other programmer for being utterly inept. Christophe said, ‘this is what’s great about America. I come here as a junior programmer and I’m a senior programmer.’ The other guy says, ‘this is what sucks about America. In France, I could never be fired!” At this point, both Gavin and Rubin erupted with laughter.
“I remember a few days in,” Gavin said, “[Christophe] came and asked me some question. I started to explain some whole system. He’s like, ‘you don’t have to explain that. I’ll figure it out. If I have a question, I’ll come back.’ He comes back an hour later and asks one little question. I started explaining. He’s like, ‘that’s slowing me down.’”
“He goes back [to his desk] and he has the whole thing done,” Gavin said with a laugh. “Or he’d come in and say, ‘I built a whole new system to do this because the other one sucked.’ Lots of systems suck, you know? You just live with them all the time, because you have limited bandwidth. He just whipped [up] these whole new, big things. I hear he still does that kind of stuff. Some process will annoy him and he’ll pop in on a Saturday and just rewrite the whole thing.”
With Wells’ and Balestra’s talent readily identified, Gavin and Rubin began to plan their exit with these two men in mind to take over for them. But it was a transparent, slow process, one that moved at an almost glacial speed so as to not upset the delicate balance that allowed Naughty Dog to work as well as it did, and thrive as much as it had up to that point.Indeed, Jak X – the post-Jak 3 PlayStation 2 cart racer – was designed specifically to give Naughty Dog some breathing room, not only in between PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, but to give space between the ultimate exit of Rubin and Gavin and the timely ascent of Wells and Balestra. Jak 3 in particular was finished in under a year, from start to finish, and Jak X was also a quick project. But the future wouldn’t be so easy. Things had to be handled delicately.
“I was burnt out,” Rubin admitted. “I was looking at this and I was like, ‘I don’t see this getting better.’ I see more and more employees. I see me managing more and more. And also, this incredibly talented Evan right below me who’s going to do one of two things. There were a couple of shaky times where some people were talking about forming their own companies or whatever. He’s either gonna leave, or he’s gonna run this company.”
Rubin contemplated his own future once he decided it was time to leave Naughty Dog. “Where’s my role going to be?” he rhetorically asked. “I briefly talked to Sony about moving up into managing all of the teams in America. That didn’t sound cool, because then I wouldn’t be able to impact any title, but I’d be responsible for all of them. That sounded like a nightmare.”
Rubin informed Sony two full years before he actually left Naughty Dog in 2004, and he even moved Evan into his office a year before he left. “The last year, he was in my office. I worked in the second-biggest office for our side of the company. He worked in the biggest office so everybody respected that he was going to be around.”
“I just wanted to take a year off,” Rubin later said. “But you can’t take a year off in this business. No director can. I had all these directors I’d become friends with in Hollywood. They’d be like, ‘I’m gonna spend six months with my kids. I’ll just tell my agent six months and do a movie when I’m done.’ You couldn’t do that as a director in the game industry. Still can’t.”
I was burnt out. I was looking at this and I was like, ‘I don’t see this getting better.'
“And you had all this responsibility,” Rubin continued. “It was just building and building and building. It had been, keep in mind, from Crash until the time I left, 10 years of no vacation and working my ass off, basically killing myself… I just said, two years before the day I left, ‘Shu [Yoshida], I gotta take time off. I’m going to transition to Evan. We’ll do everything right for the company to make sure Naughty Dog survives over these two years.”“
“It was very nicely staged,” Gavin noted. “We had, in that last year in particular, Evan… Christophe… technically, they reported to us. But we didn’t tell them anything to do. They just did their thing. Occasionally, we’d throw out some advice.”
“I had a role in the company,” Rubin said. “If you could come to me with a question, I would give you an answer and you were going to like it or not like it, but that was the answer. That last year, when they came to me for the final answer, I would say, ‘Evan makes the final answer.’ That helped the transition be completely smooth. Everyone knew it was coming. Everyone knew to respect him. They had already worked with him. If there were questions, they came to me. We all worked it out. They were all ready.”
The rank and file of Naughty Dog may have looked at Wells and Balestra as their new leaders, and were ready for the transition. What the company wasn’t ready for, however, was the turbulent time ahead, one that saw Naughty Dog attempt to split into two teams, only to have one game scrapped and another game incubate for so long on all-new complicated hardware that it nearly broke the studio’s morale.
Indeed, the next few years – as Naughty Dog jumped from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable – were the most turbulent and trying in the company’s history, and it almost didn’t live to tell the tale.
With Jak & Daxter’s PlayStation 2 trilogy (and its cart racing epilogue) behind it, Naughty Dog looked forward to PlayStation 3. PS3’s future was wildly uncertain, and the studio wanted to contribute something meaningful to its library. With the creation of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Naughty Dog succeeded at doing just that.
But its extremely popular franchise starring daring adventurer Nathan Drake wasn’t easy to make. In fact, the rise of Drake coincided with the most difficult period in Naughty Dog’s three decade-long history, a period so wrought with issues that Naughty Dog quickly found itself in serious trouble.
I. To Jak, or Not to Jak?
Naughty Dog released four games on PlayStation 2, and its Jak & Daxter series is among the console’s most fondly-remember titles. But a big transition was afoot, and as the studio began investigating new technologies, Sony began to utilize Naughty Dog’s technical prowess to achieve important goals for the greater first party family.We were a company of 60 or 70 people, and I think 25 people left in the span of that year. We were bleeding talent.
Making matters more complicated, Sony and Naughty Dog decided to cut the studio in two. The famous split that resulted in the concurrent development of Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us wasn’t the first time Naughty Dog became a two project studio. It was just the first time the split actually worked well enough to broadcast it to the world.“
“Those couple of years in transition [between PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3], that was a very traumatic time for this company,” Cinematics Animation Lead Josh Scherr candidly stated.
“Yeah,” Narrative Design Lead Taylor Kurosaki agreed. “It was a lot of things all coming to a head at the same time. It was moving from PS2 to PS3. It was trying to become a two-team studio. Going to two new platforms (PS3 and PSP), Jason [Rubin] and Andy [Gavin] really finally just stepping away.”
“It was really traumatic,” Scherr later said. “We were a company of 60 or 70 people, and I think 25 people left in the span of that year. We were bleeding talent.”
“It was brutal,” Kurosaki interjected. “The other thing was, all the PlayStation 2 engine was basically completely architected by Andy. It was GOAL and LISP and all these other arcane languages, half of which he had basically invented. How do you move all of that code to PlayStation 3? The answer is, you don’t. We were starting from nothing.”“It was bleak,” Scherr said, to which Kurosaki quickly answered, “It could have been a total disaster.”
But there was a method to the madness, or so it seemed. “We had to grow at a faster rate than we were used to,” Naughty Dog co-president Christophe Balestra remembered. The studio, fiercely proud of its unique, proprietary technology, was suddenly transitionin