Naughty Dog: how two teenagers built PlayStation’s most decorated studio
In 1984, two high schoolers start coding between classes. Their first game nets them $250. Thirty-six years later, the Naughty Dog studio sweeps up more than 300 Game of the Year awards.
The history of Naughty Dog: the complete timeline
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The early days — JAM Software1984Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, two programming-obsessed teenagers, found JAM Software in McLean, Virginia. Their first game to actually sell, Ski Crazed, ships two years later on the Apple II through Baudville. The check comes to $250. Dream Zone follows in 1988.
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Enter the dog1989The duo renames the studio Naughty Dog, after a character Jason Rubin used to doodle. They sign with Electronic Arts for Keef the Thief, then Rings of Power (1991), an ambitious Mega Drive RPG that swallows nearly three years of their lives.
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The turning point — Way of the Warrior1994A digitized fighting game for the 3DO, shot in their own apartment with friends standing in as actors. The result is uneven, but it catches the eye of Universal Interactive Studios, which hands them a three-game deal. That’s where they meet Mark Cerny.
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The breakout — Crash BandicootSeptember 9, 1996Crash Bandicoot lands on PlayStation. A technical stunner with an instantly recognizable face, it becomes Sony’s unofficial mascot in the fight against Mario and Sonic. Two sequels follow in 1997 and 1998, each outdoing the last: the trilogy goes on to sell tens of millions of copies.
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Crash ends, Sony steps in1999 – 2001Crash Team Racing closes the marsupial era on a high, but the IP belongs to Universal: the studio turns the page and takes nothing with it. Two years later, Sony Computer Entertainment buys Naughty Dog, which rolls straight into Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy on PS2 — an open world with zero loading screens, a major technical feat for its day. The series turns darker from Jak II (2003) onward, the studio’s first step toward a more grown-up tone.
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The founders leave2004Twenty years after founding Naughty Dog, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin step away, handing the reins to Evan Wells and Stephen White. White leaves in 2005, and Wells serves as sole president until Christophe Balestra joins him as co-president in 2006. The pair lead the studio together until Balestra’s departure in 2017. Naughty Dog enters life beyond its founders — a transition that’s anything but guaranteed in the games industry.
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Uncharted changes the game2007 – 2009On PS3, Naughty Dog ditches cartoons for “live-action” adventure. Under creative director Amy Hennig, Nathan Drake sets a new bar: adventure-comedy writing, full performance capture, blockbuster staging. Two years later, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves racks up dozens of Game of the Year awards and pushes the studio into a different league — the train sequence becomes a textbook case. Uncharted 3 follows in 2011.
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The Last of UsJune 14, 2013Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley deliver the studio’s most radical swerve yet: a post-apocalyptic drama about a parasitic fungus, carried by the bond between Joel and Ellie. A unanimous masterpiece, the best-selling PS3 exclusive, and a tipping point for storytelling in video games.
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The end of Nathan Drake2016–2017After Amy Hennig’s exit in 2014, Druckmann and Straley take over Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which passes 16 million copies. The Lost Legacy (2017) wraps up the saga. Naughty Dog hasn’t touched the franchise since.
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The Last of Us Part IIJune 19, 2020Delayed by the pandemic and preceded by massive leaks, the sequel splits players like few games before it — and still becomes the most awarded title in history, with 326 awards. A record Elden Ring will snatch away two years later. Behind the scenes, the press documents punishing working conditions; the studio promises to learn from them.
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HBO series and a changing of the guard2023On January 15, 2023, HBO premieres The Last of Us with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. A critical and popular triumph, the show sends game sales through the roof and puts Naughty Dog on the map far beyond the PlayStation crowd — no video game adaptation had ever pulled it off to this degree. Neil Druckmann, co-writer and co-director, picks up a second job title in the process. The same year, Evan Wells retires after twenty-five years; Druckmann takes sole command of the studio.
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Intergalactic: The Heretic ProphetDecember 2024 → 2027?At The Game Awards, the studio unveils its first new IP since 2013: a sci-fi action-adventure starring Tati Gabrielle as bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun. Then a year and a half of silence. On August 31, 2026, Naughty Dog finally announces it has wrapped shooting on the cinematics. Still no official date: Bloomberg and several sources point to 2027 on PS5, with no PC version in the plans.
Every game Naughty Dog has ever made
27 games in 40 years, from the Apple II to the PlayStation 5. Remasters, remakes and collections developed by the studio are included.
Behind the scenes at the Naughty Dog studio
A homebrew programming language, a studio name picked in twenty-four hours, a game wiped by accident: forty years of Naughty Dog stories you won’t find on the back of the box.
The game that got erased — and rebuilt in a weekend
1986. Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the two high schoolers who founded the studio two years earlier, have just finished a skiing game on the Apple II. Gavin wipes the only copy while copying pirated games onto the disk. Rubin reprograms the whole thing from scratch in two days. That rescued version, Ski Crazed, is the one a small software publisher, Baudville, buys for $250 — their very first check.
The time they had left to come up with a name
Just as they’re about to sign with Electronic Arts, the duo discovers “JAM Software” is already trademarked in Australia. They have barely a day to find something else. They fall back on a character Rubin kept sketching in his notebooks: a mutt in sunglasses who hangs out on the beach with girls. The studio becomes Naughty Dog on September 9, 1989.
Nine people, one console, one marsupial
In the mid-’90s, Sony has no mascot. Nintendo has Mario, Sega has Sonic, and the PlayStation has racing games and fighting games. In a small office on loan from Universal Interactive, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin take on the problem: build a 3D platformer on a machine that was never designed for one. Internally, the project is nicknamed “Sonic’s Ass Game” — because players will spend the whole thing staring at the hero’s backside. To squeeze into the console’s 2 MB of RAM, the team invents everything from scratch: a system that pages level data straight off the CD, a homebrew scripting language, characters more detailed than the hardware is supposed to handle. Their producer is Mark Cerny, future architect of the PS4 and PS5. Sony first refuses to make him an official mascot, then changes its mind once the numbers come in: Crash becomes the face of the brand in North America, right up to that commercial where a guy in a Crash suit shows up to taunt Nintendo’s headquarters.
— How the tiny Naughty Dog studio became the face of PlayStation
The studio that wrote its games in its own language
Andy Gavin never does anything the normal way. For Crash, he designs GOOL (Game Oriented Object Lisp), then for Jak and Daxter, GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp) — a homegrown Lisp dialect that lets you rewrite a game’s code while it’s running on the devkit. A brilliant eccentricity, but one nobody else could inherit: after the Sony buyout, the studio has to switch back to C++.
Tens of millions sold, and nothing to show for it
The Crash IP never belonged to Naughty Dog: it was owned by Universal, the publisher. Three games and a kart racer later, the studio turns the page and walks away empty-handed. It draws a lasting lesson from the experience — never again build a hit on a property it doesn’t own.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Naughty Dog, and when?
The studio was founded in 1984 by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, both teenagers at the time, under the name JAM Software in McLean, Virginia — the move to California wouldn’t come until the mid-’90s. It was renamed Naughty Dog in 1989, after a cartoon dog Jason Rubin used to draw. Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin leave the studio in 2004, having laid the groundwork for a leadership transition. Evan Wells and Stephen White take over at the helm of Naughty Dog.
Who owns the Naughty Dog studio today?
Naughty Dog has belonged to Sony since 2001, when it was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment (now Sony Interactive Entertainment). The studio is part of PlayStation Studios and develops exclusively for PlayStation consoles, with later PC ports for some titles. It’s headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
Does Naughty Dog still own Crash Bandicoot?
No. The Crash Bandicoot IP never belonged to Naughty Dog: it was held by Universal Interactive Studios, publisher of the three games and Crash Team Racing. It passed through Vivendi before landing at Activision, which handed the recent entries to other studios: Vicarious Visions for the N. Sane Trilogy, Toys for Bob for Crash 4. Since the Activision Blizzard acquisition, the franchise now belongs to Microsoft. Naughty Dog hasn’t worked on the series since 1999.
What is Naughty Dog’s next game?
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, announced at The Game Awards in December 2024. It’s the studio’s first new IP since The Last of Us in 2013. Set in a retro-futuristic sci-fi universe, it follows bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun, played by actress Tati Gabrielle, stranded on the isolated planet of Sempiria. No official release date has been announced; a Bloomberg report and several well-placed sources point to a 2027 release as a PS5 exclusive, with no PC version announced. In late August 2026, the studio confirmed it had wrapped shooting on the cinematic sequences.
Why did Naughty Dog stop making Uncharted?
The studio deliberately closed the saga with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016), the story of Nathan Drake’s retirement, then with the standalone The Lost Legacy (2017). After Amy Hennig’s departure in 2014 and the success of The Last of Us, the team chose to focus on new stories rather than stretch the franchise any further. Sony has since handed the Uncharted universe to other teams for the ports and the film adaptation. That said, the studio has never officially retired the license: a fifth entry was reportedly considered before the pandemic, and in 2025 Neil Druckmann confirmed that a second AAA project was in development at Naughty Dog, led by a separate team.
What is Naughty Dog’s most awarded game?
The Last of Us Part II (2020), with 326 Game of the Year awards. It was an all-time record at launch; it has since been overtaken by Elden Ring (2022) and then by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which puts Naughty Dog’s game in third place all-time today. The first The Last of Us (2013) had collected close to 250, and Uncharted 2 several dozen in 2009. A rare kind of consistency: three console generations, three games of the year.
Who runs the Naughty Dog studio?
Neil Druckmann, as studio head and head of creative. Named co-president in 2020 alongside Evan Wells, he has run the studio solo since Wells retired in late 2023. Druckmann is the creator of The Last of Us and co-director of Uncharted 4. Before them, Naughty Dog was co-presided by Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra, from 2006 to 2017.
Are Naughty Dog games available on PC?
Some of them. Sony has ported Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (Uncharted 4 + The Lost Legacy), The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part II Remastered to PC. The PS3 Uncharted games, the Jak and Daxter saga and the original Crash titles, on the other hand, aren’t natively available on PC. New games launch first as PlayStation exclusives, with a PC port usually following one to two years later — but it’s not guaranteed: no PC version has been announced for Intergalactic.
