Colin Moriarty has written an incredibly in-depth feature for IGN that covers the entire history of Naughty Dog. I assumed everyone has been reading this, but I couldn't find a thread.
I've copied some of the best quotes here, but I would encourage everyone to read through the entire article - it's really interesting stuff. Probably the best piece of journalism I've seen at IGN. Note that there's still one part left to cover the development of TLoU.
Part 1 - The Beginning
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=1
Part 2 - Crash Bandicoot
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=5
Part 3 - Sony Acquisition / Jak and Daxter
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=9
Part 4 - Uncharted
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=13
I've copied some of the best quotes here, but I would encourage everyone to read through the entire article - it's really interesting stuff. Probably the best piece of journalism I've seen at IGN. Note that there's still one part left to cover the development of TLoU.
Part 1 - The Beginning
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=1
For being 12, [my games] were very advanced code-wise, and Jasons looked great, because he had this artistic inclination. He could draw really well. But his didnt run very well and mine didnt 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 specialities.
Instead of making their own game, they decided to copy Nintendos. And like bold kids that didnt know any better, they began making a facsimile of the game in 1983... It never occurred to us that you cant just put out a game that copies characters exactly. But that didnt stop them. The boys used 1000 ISO film to record all of the games 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.
"...I remember EA saying to us that we probably shouldnt have gone with comedy, after the fact. That kind of stung me, because it was one of those things where we didnt have an opportunity to decide what was going on. We had already signed up, and they had the right to do this.
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... You could tell, in someone elses 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.
The folks they got to help them on Way of the Warrior were from all walks of life... And their lead tester? He was the Valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1994, a guy named David Liu... He was a prolific, professional Street Fighter II player... [he] was [even] on wanted lists at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City for card counting.
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 MITs masters program. They sold their remaining belongings, like a stereo, to get by while they finished the game.
Andys 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... The last $10,000 that we had, effectively 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. 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 Dogs project.
Part 2 - Crash Bandicoot
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=5
Way of the Warrior came out. It was what it was, Rubin said, obliquely referencing the games mediocre quality and soft sales. But Universal said to us, pick a platform, pick an IP, pick a type of game, and well fund it.
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 lets do one of those.
We eventually had what we jokingly called the Sonics Ass idea. In other words, a platformer with a camera behind the main character that would follow him around.
For the longest time, Crashs name was Willy the Wombat. Thats what we had settled on. No one really loved it, Kurosaki admitted
The head of [Sony Computer Entertainment America] was like, What is that?! That looks so good!... After seeing the tape, Sony sent down people and they looked at it, and their jaws dropped, Rubin continued... 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 Nintendos booth, and put Crash there. [Sony] signed a deal with Universal to be the publisher.
"...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.
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.
[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. There was really no use for Universal, 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.
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.
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.
CTR we also self-funded. [We] 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.
Its 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.
Part 3 - Sony Acquisition / Jak and Daxter
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=9
Around [the time CTR came out], we went to Tokyo. We were sitting there with [Game Informers] 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... 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. Theres no where to go but down from here.
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 wasnt possible anymore. Jak & Daxter required $14 million to make a fairly paltry sum by todays standards but that doesnt take into account that Gavin and Rubin each put $2.25 million into its development, accounting for about a third of Jaks overall cost.
The only way Sony owning Jak & Daxter made sense to Naughty Dogs co-founders and Sony itself was if Sony simply purchased the studio outright. They said, write up a document with what you think the companys worth and well 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 theyre as generous as I always thought Sony is, or I underbid. Based on whats happened, I underbid, but who knows?
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 couldnt take with their own money Thats why this company, unlike a lot of other companies out there, is still creating content thats so different, unique, and individual.
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 couldnt even import the machines. It couldnt get through customs. It was this supercomputer. It had to be searched and made sure that youre 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.
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. Six months in, were like, okay, we can barely even render this thing at one hertz.
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.
Thompson specifically discussed the original Jak & Daxters 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.
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 Jasons head. Jak II, we really went all out in terms of the ambition. Everybody pushed everything.
Jak II launched on October 14, 2003 in North America. Theres 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.
Unlike the debate over the quality of the game, theres 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.
The studio was disheveled during the Jak & Daxter period, according to Mosesian. There were a lot of people strewn around. There wasnt any real organization It just didnt seem like that triple-A studio from first impression. Mosesian didnt 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.
Interestingly, while crunch is part of the culture, its not forced upon anyone. Yet, everyone stays and crunches regardless. We dont mandate crunch, he said. I personally dont force people to crunch. Youre here on your own. Environment Artist Reuben Shah jumped into the conversation. Ive never gotten an e-mail saying you better be here these days or these hours!
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.... Im like, really? Im 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 youre used to structure, youre used to hierarchy, Pangilinan suggested. Exactly, Shah answered. I wasnt supposed to go to The Boss. I was supposed to go to my lead or my supervisor and take it up and maybe Ill 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. Thats 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.
I remember specifically, Evan [Wells] had come in and he had asked how to do something on Crash 3. Id 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 hes done this huge amount of stuff in it already. He was just asking some refining questions. Im like, whoa. I went over to Jason and said, you know, I think Evan might be the find here. He got this.
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 whats great about America. I come here as a junior programmer and Im 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.
Part 4 - Uncharted
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog?page=13
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 wasnt 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.
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 dont. We were starting from nothing.
The PSP game was interesting, Thompson recalls. [Naughty Dog] had this other idea for a Jak game. At the time, they were really excited about PSP. The real issue with PSP, and in general with the studio, is that Naughty Dog is a group of industry professionals that craves cutting-edge technology, bleeding-edge technology. At the time, the PSP, even though it was really popular and successful, it just wasnt enough to keep the people here satisfied and focused. They needed a bigger challenge.
First off, the PSP team was awesome, McIntosh said. It was so much fun. That was the most fun I ever had making games. We got that game up and running in like three months, straight port, and it was a full vertical slice. That was a lot of fun [But] the reason the PSP team was killed was not because of the PSP project. It was because of Uncharted. It was because we needed those people on Uncharted. It just wasnt working.
But as for the Jak & Daxter project that Naughty Dog never got to see through, theres some regret. At the time, it looked like [High Impact Games was] going to be able to do a pretty good job with it, Thompson said. I dont want to say anything disparaging. I like the guys at High Impact. [But] if we had had to do it all over again, we would have done some things differently in the execution of The Lost Frontier. Im not happy with that being Jaks swan song. I think we could have done a lot better.
[On Uncharted concepts -] There was a concept art folder, Neil Druckmann added, and I would keep going in there and looking at stuff. Early on, it was like this open world, Victorian era. It had a mixture of steampunk and flying vehicles. It was kind of a mishmash of a bunch of ideas. Then the main dude, I remember, he looked like Marty McFly from Back to the Future. He had this orange vest when I first saw him running around.
But the idea of saying that your main character [Nathan Drake] was going to be a guy in a t-shirt and jeans, and thats it, was pretty scary for Sony, because how do you turn that into an icon, a mascot? For them, a character like [God of Wars] Kratos is so much easier to wrap a [marketing] campaign around."
There were a lot of people who started working at Naughty Dog because that was the game they wanted to make. They wanted to make Jak or Crash. So there was that faction of people who were disillusioned with the direction the studio was going in. There was a wave of people who left because of that
Even a month or two before the E3 [2007] that we actually showed it playable, we still had a reticle-based aiming system where youd auto-target. You could flip between targets like Zelda. Then, at some point, somebody said this isnt cool, lets try something else. Then we ended up with the cover-based stuff that we always see now.
If there was one thing that I wish we could have done, its getting the screen tearing taken care of. Thats still my biggest regret on Uncharted. Thats the one thing thats just painfully obvious, that we could have corrected.
I think this is true for a lot of companies and a lot of engines, he later said, but if we go back now and look at Uncharted 1, compared to the sequels or The Last of Us, its just like, oh my god. Its hard to believe its on the same hardware. We didnt even have a skin shader on Uncharted 1. Everyone looks like these waxen dolls. Theres no screen space ambient occlusion, so nothing looks like its really grounded in the environment at all
It seemed that Naughty Dogs newest game was winning every award out there. It was just Uncharted 2, Pangilinan said. When it came out, suddenly everyone knew us. It was pretty amazing, Reuben Shah added. When we were getting BAFTAs, I was like, holy crap, Im holding a BAFTA. We had like six of them.
There are a lot of games out there that are really amazing. It was almost embarrassing, with Uncharted 2, because a lot of our competitors just got shutout. They got nothing. We might as well have just stayed up on the stage.
Obviously, review scores and public response are very important, but you want to distill that stuff down and take the most important aspects out of it, rather than just being completely reactionary to things that you read online, Josh Scherr said. If you read [online gaming forum] NeoGAF, Uncharted 3 is simultaneously the best and worst game ever made. Its kind of like Scrodingers cat in a way.
Theres also something about success painting a bigger target on your back, Wells interjected. Now its hip to hate on whats successful. Once all those awards were given to the second one, now people are just going to look for reasons to pick on the next one that comes out. The gaming culture has a tendency to try to dog-pile on successful games.
When youre a game developer and people say, oh, theyre lazy developers, they try to take advantage of the consumer, theyre phoning it in. No. None of that is ever true. At least not in my career in this industry, and certainly not here at Naughty Dog. Everybody just pours their souls into everything they work on. That doesnt mean its always going to be brilliant, but thats a lesson you learn as you get older, or as youve been doing something creative as a career.