Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog, Inc.

File:Naughty Dog.gif
Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video Game Industry
Founded	1986
Headquarters	Santa Monica, CA
Key people	Evan Wells, Co-President Christophe Balestra, Co-President
Products	Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Jak & Daxter series Crash Bandicoot series
Number of employees	85
Website	http://www.naughtydog.com/

Naughty Dog is an American video game company founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1986, and based in Santa Monica, California. It has been part of Sony since being acquired in 2001.

Gavin and Rubin produced a sequence of progressively more successful games, including Rings of Power for the Sega Genesis and Way of the Warrior for the 3DO. The latter was created with low-budget but still plausible offering prompted Universal Studios to sign the duo to a three-title deal and fund the expansion of the company. Mark Cerny, who had produced Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega, convinced Naughty Dog to focus its new resources on creating a character-based platform game that would fully exploit the 3D capabilities of the new systems.

Ultimately, this led to the release of Crash Bandicoot (working title: Willy the Wombat) for the PlayStation on August 31, 1996. Naughty Dog developed three Crash Bandicoot sequels over the next several years. In January 2001, it was announced Sony would acquire Naughty Dog.

After developing the fourth Crash Bandicoot game (Crash Team Racing), the company began working on Jak and Daxter for PlayStation 2.

The Jak and Daxter series of games were largely written in Andy Gavin's custom dialect of the Lisp programming language called GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp). This is likely due to Andy's exposure to Lisp at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. GOAL itself is written in Allegro Common Lisp from Franz, Inc.[1]

In 2004, Naughty Dog's studio president and co-founder, Jason Rubin left the company [2] to work on a new project named Iron and the Maiden. [3]

Early history

Naughty Dog's origins go back to 1986, when the company was named "JAM". Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, who were 16 years old at the time, had their first commercial game published: Ski Crazed for the 8-bit Apple II series. Two years later they moved up to writing software for the then next-generation Apple IIGS with the game Dream Zone, which was popular enough to be ported to several other platforms. By 1989, they wrote Keef the Thief for the Apple IIGS and with that title, officially changed the company's name to Naughty Dog.

Moving away from the Apple II series, in the early 1990's Naughty Dog began writing software for game consoles such as the Sega Genesis and 3DO, and by the mid 90's, migrated to the PlayStation, which is where the company gained its widest recognization and fame.

Associates

Insomniac

Since working together in the same building on the Universal Studios backlot, Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games have had a close relationship. Producer Mark Cerny has worked extensively with (and influenced) both companies. They have historically made similar types of games. For example, in the late 1990s, Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot series and Insomniac's Spyro the Dragon series both competed on the PlayStation as character-heavy platforming games with imaginative environments. With the release of the PlayStation 2, licenses for both series were sold to Vivendi Universal (now simply Vivendi) and both developers continued in friendly competition after the creation of their new flagship franchises (Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank, respectively).

Both series have strikingly similar details in common with one another: they each focus on two main protagonists (one more athletically-able with the other acting as a sidekick), they each have a generous sense of humor as well as adventurous story and they each take place in large and lively fantasy worlds. The similarities even run on a technical level, as Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank series even uses a heavily modified version of the engine used in Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter games. The close relationship between the developers has led them both to add in-jokes and references to each other in many of their games.

With the release of the PlayStation 3, both developers seemed to be changing focus aesthetically from character-based platformers to more realistic, mature-themed action games with Naughty Dog's action game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Insomniac's sci-fi first-person shooter Resistance: Fall of Man.

Both Naughty Dog and Insomniac have stated that they don't have plans for making a game together. However, with Vivendi holding the publishing rights to both the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon characters, there have been crossover games released between the two. Neither Naughty Dog nor Insomniac had any creative input or involvement whatsoever with these games.

Ready At Dawn

In 2003, one of the members of Naughty Dog left to form a new development company, Ready At Dawn, with various former members of Blizzard. Their first project was Daxter for the PSP.

Games

PlayStation 3

• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007) (in development)

PlayStation 2

• Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001)
• Jak II (2003)
• Jak 3 (2004)
• Jak X: Combat Racing (2005)

PlayStation

• Crash Bandicoot (1996)
• Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997)
• Crash Bandicoot: Warped (1998)
• Crash Team Racing (CTR) (1999)

3DO Interactive Multiplayer

• Way Of The Warrior (1994)

Sega Genesis

• Rings of Power (1991)

Related Wiki's

• Insomniac Games
• Ready At Dawn
• Blizzard Entertainment

External Links

• Naughty Dog homepage
• Naughty Dog's Twenty Questions
• Timeline of Naughty Dog and Crash
• Franz, Inc's page about GOAL
• Post-Mortem discussion of Jak and Daxter (registration required)