Naughty Dog

• 1. Introduction

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  Naughty Dog, the Santa Monica, California studio behind Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us, began under a different name. In 1984 it was JAM Software, and JAM stood for Jason, Andy and Mike. One of those three names did not stay on the door for long.

  Today Naughty Dog is an American first-party developer, which means it makes games for a console maker that also owns it. This documentary asks how two school friends built a studio that Sony would eventually own, why the studio moved from cartoon worlds to realistic ones, and why its teams work without producers.

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• 2. Two Friends, One Class

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  Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin met in 1982 at a weekend Hebrew school in Virginia, when both were pre-teens. They discovered a shared enthusiasm for computers and video games. During class they traded talk about programming, game development and game piracy.

  Having experimented with the programming languages Lisp and C++, the pair teamed up with a friend named Mike Goyet. Together they founded JAM Software in 1984.

  Goyet lost interest in the work and contributed nothing to the company's operations. Within months, Rubin and Gavin bought back his share. The three letters stayed, but their meaning changed to "Jason and Andy's Magic".

  Rubin and Gavin chose to write software for the Apple II. For their second title they decided on a skiing game, and that project nearly ended before it began.

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• 3. Ski Crazed and Beyond

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  Ski Crazed, originally titled Ski Stud, exists because of a blunder. While the skiing game was in production, Gavin accidentally copied bootleg games over the only copy of it. Rubin rebuilt the game within a single weekend. It played slowly, so Gavin reprogrammed it to run quicker.

  Baudville later bought the game from Jam Software for $250. Ski Crazed went on to sell more than 1,000 copies.

  Dream Zone, an Apple IIGS graphic adventure, was released in 1988. It was ported to the Atari ST, the Amiga and PCs. In 1989 came Keef the Thief, published by Electronic Arts for the Apple IIGS, Amiga and PCs.

  On the 9th of September 1989, Rubin and Gavin renamed Jam Software as Naughty Dog. They wanted a fresh start and a clean break from their relationship with Baudville.

  Rings of Power, published by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis, followed in the early 1990s. Programmer Vijay Pande joined Rubin and Gavin on it. Pande later became better known for orchestrating Folding@home, a distributed computing project researching disease, at Stanford University.

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• 4. Building Crash Bandicoot

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  In 1994, Rubin and Gavin produced Way of the Warrior for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and presented it to Mark Cerny of Universal Interactive Studios. Cerny was pleased. He signed Naughty Dog to Universal Interactive Studios for three additional games.

  Cerny also pushed the studio toward a character-based platform game that would use the 3D abilities of the new consoles. Rubin and Gavin planned a three-dimensional action-platform game. Players would stare at the hero's rear throughout, so the team jokingly codenamed it "Sonic's Ass Game".

  Production began in 1994, and Naughty Dog hired more employees. The team invented a development tool called Game Oriented Object Lisp to build the characters and gameplay. Cartoonists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson were recruited to design the cast, and their work produced the title character, Crash Bandicoot.

  After 14 months of development, the game was shown to Sony Computer Entertainment, which signed on to publish it. The public first saw it at E3. Crash Bandicoot reached the PlayStation in 1996 and sold over 6.8 million copies, making it one of the console's top sellers.

  Naughty Dog developed two more Crash Bandicoot games, plus a kart racing spin-off called Crash Team Racing. After that, the studio began work on Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for the PlayStation 2.

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• 5. The Sony Deal

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  Sony bought Naughty Dog in 2001 and made it a first-party studio. Gavin explained the reasoning in 2025. The studio had sought a buyer because the cost of AAA development was skyrocketing, and the founders were paying for it from their own pockets.

  The numbers tell the story. Their first games in the 1980s had budgets of around $50,000. Crash Bandicoot had risen to $1.5 million. Gavin said Sony's purchase gave the company the stability it needed to keep making games.

  Under Sony, Naughty Dog made the first Jak and Daxter game, and the series met similar success to Crash Bandicoot. Jak II arrived in 2003, Jak 3 in 2004 and Jak X: Combat Racing in 2005.

  While Jak 3 and Jak X were in development, Rubin and Gavin slowly shifted Evan Wells and Stephen White into the role of co-presidents. By the time the founders left, the handover was complete. In 2004, they departed to co-found an Internet startup called Flektor.

  White was replaced after a year, while Wells remained a co-president.

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• 6. From Fantasy to Realism

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  Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, released in 2007, was Naughty Dog's first PlayStation 3 game. It was also the studio's first approach to realistic worlds and characters. The Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series had been set in fantastical, fictional places.

  The franchise drew praise for its cinematic quality and technical proficiency. Several sequels and spin-offs followed over the next decade. Among Thieves arrived in 2009, Drake's Deception in 2011, A Thief's End in 2016 and The Lost Legacy in 2017.

  As of December 2017, the Uncharted franchise had sold over 41 million copies worldwide. Behind that run of sequels, a second team at the studio was preparing something very different.

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• 7. The Last of Us

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  At the 2011 Spike TV Video Game Awards, Naughty Dog unveiled a new intellectual property called The Last of Us. It was described as a "post-apocalyptic third-person action-adventure game". A secondary team at the studio was developing it.

  The story follows a teenage girl named Ellie and her adult protector, Joel. They travel through a United States overrun with humans infected by a disease that echoes the infection caused by Cordyceps unilateralis.

  The game was released in 2013 to universal acclaim and spawned a franchise. On the 7th of December 2013, at the first edition of Spike's VGX show, Naughty Dog won Studio of the Year for its work on it. The studio also took the same award at the Golden Joystick Awards in 2013 and again in 2020.

  In 2012 and 2013, Naughty Dog teamed with Mass Media Inc. to release the Jak and Daxter Collection. It holds high-definition ports of the original PlayStation 2 trilogy, released for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita respectively.

  In May 2013, the studio confirmed it would keep the in-house engine used for Uncharted and The Last of Us on the PlayStation 4. On the 23rd of November 2013, Corrinne Yu announced she had joined Naughty Dog. She had been principal engine architect at 343 Industries, the Halo 4 developer owned by Microsoft.

  A remastered version of the first game arrived on the PlayStation 4. The Last of Us Part II followed for the PlayStation 4 in 2020, to similar acclaim.

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• 8. No Producers Allowed

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  Neither of Naughty Dog's teams has a producer. The studio is known for handling development in its own way, and it relies on minimal middle-management.

  The ICE Team is a different kind of group inside the studio. It is one of the central technology groups of Sony's World Wide Studios. ICE originally stood for Initiative for a Common Engine, a name that describes the purpose the team was created for.

  Its job is to build core graphics technologies for Sony's first-party titles around the world. That means low-level game engine components, graphics processing pipelines, supporting tools, and tools for profiling and debugging graphics.

  The team also supports outside developers. It offers them a suite of engine components and a graphics analysis, profiling and debugging tool for the RSX. Both are meant to help developers get better performance out of PlayStation hardware.

  On the 4th of March 2014, Uncharted lead writer Amy Hennig left the studio. Uncharted 3 director Justin Richmond and The Last of Us lead artist Nate Wells soon followed.

  In March 2017, Balestra announced he would retire as co-president on the 3rd of April 2017, after fifteen years at the company. Evan Wells stayed on as president. In September 2017, game director Bruce Straley announced his own departure. After a sabbatical, he said he had "found his energy focusing in other directions".

  In October 2017, former environment artist David Ballard claimed that he suffered a mental breakdown after sexual harassment by a senior team member in late 2015. He said he told PlayStation's HR department and was terminated the following day. He added that he was offered $20,000 to remain silent, which he declined. Naughty Dog answered with a statement. It said it had "not found any evidence of having received allegations from Mr. Ballard that he was harassed in any way".

  Creative director Neil Druckmann was promoted to vice president in March 2018. On the 4th of December 2020 he became co-president alongside Wells. Alison Mori, formerly director of operations, and Christian Gyrling, formerly co-director of programming, became co-vice presidents in his place. On the 4th of October 2021, communications director Arne Meyer was promoted to co-vice president.

  In July 2022, Josh Scherr announced his departure after 21 years with the company. A year later, in July 2023, Wells said he would retire by the end of the year. Druckmann became head of creative, Mori became studio manager and head of operations, Meyer became head of culture and communications, and Gyrling became head of technology.

  The leadership team grew further. Erick Pangilinan and Jeremy Yates became co-heads of the art departments, and Anthony Newman became head of production and design. In November 2023, Gyrling left after 17 years, and Travis McIntosh replaced him as head of technology.

  The studio's next project, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, is being developed for the PlayStation 5.

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