Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog, Inc. (known as Jam Software before renaming in 1989) is an American video game developer based in Santa Monica, California. Founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1984 as an independent developer, the studio was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2001. Gavin and Rubin produced a sequence of progressively more successful games, including Rings of Power for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Way of the Warrior for the 3DO. The latter — a very low-budget but still plausible offering — prompted Universal Interactive 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 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 Crash Team Racing, the company began working on Jak and Daxter for PlayStation 2.

In 2004, Naughty Dog's studio president and co-founder, Jason Rubin, left the company to work on a new project named Iron and the Maiden. In addition to their inhouse game team, Naughty Dog is also home to the ICE Team, one of Sony's World Wide Studios central technology groups. The company's first PlayStation 3 title, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, was released in 2007, its sequel, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, in 2009, and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, released in November 2011. Naughty Dog is also infamous for having a history of not only developing one game at a time, but only one franchise per console; a trend that has garnered heavy amounts of criticism amongst fans. This lasted until Naughty Dog announced a new IP called The Last of Us at the Spike Video Game Awards on December 10, 2011 on the PlayStation 3, which was in development by a second team at the studio.

On November 21, 2011, it was announced on Sony's PlayStation Blog that the Jak and Daxter series would be re-released on PlayStation 3 as part of an HD collection. Released on February 7, 2012, the collection was handled by Mass Media Inc., and brought "720p high definition with crisper visuals, smoother gameplay animation, full stereoscopic 3D to the series", along with support for the PlayStation trophy system.