Naughty Dog

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Naughty Dog is an American video game company founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1986. 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 September 9, 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 entire Jak and Daxter series is written in Andy Gavin's proprietary variant 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. Unlike almost all PS2 games, C++ is not used in the Jak & Daxter game engine you see at all. However, C++ was used as one of many tools in the development [link].

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

Contents

1 Early history
2 Associates
3 Games

4 See also
5 External links

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

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 style games, which sometimes contain references to each other (look at the some of the city walls in Jak II or check out the start-up menu in [[Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando]]). Also, Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank series uses a heavily modified version of the engine used in Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter games. There are even recent releases that feature both Crash and Spyro characters (Note: these were developed by Universal, however). Because of their friendship, many fans wondered if the two companies would collaborate on a game. However they have, in the past, publicly stated that they don't have plans for making a game together.

In [[Jak X: Combat Racing]], Ratchet is an unlockable character, and Clank is an unlockable bobblehead ornament.

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

Games

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

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

Untitled Naughty Dog Project

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)

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