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Naughty Dog Has Been Split in Twain

The Last of Us team has been hard at work for over two years.

Usually when a studio decides to reveal a new game you only get a short snippet, not the full length trailer that Naughty Dog revealed at this year’s Spike TV Video Game Awards for their upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive title, The Last of Us.  This reveal was especially surprising since Naughty Dog has traditionally been a ‘one game at a time’ studio with a singular creative team.

But with the success of their marquee franchise Uncharted, Naughty Dog has decided that it’s time to grow and split the crew into two teams.  The news came direct from the studio’s Co-President Christophe Balestra via his Twitter account. 

Perhaps even more surprising is that this split happened quite some time ago with Neil Druckmann revealing, also via Twitter, that he’s been working on The Last of Us for the past two years.

This split will presumably give the studio much more flexibility in terms of production, effectively allowing one team to continually work on the blockbuster franchise that is Uncharted while the other can experiment with new IPs such as The Last of Us.

At this time it is probable that the Uncharted team is working on finishing up DLC support for Uncharted 3 before moving onto another project.  It’s not known what that project will be at this time, but don’t be surprised if it’s Uncharted 4 or if it’s for the PlayStation 4.


 

Comments

Nick DiMola Director

12/13/2011 at 10:55 AM

Wow, two years - that's insane. Pretty cool that they managed to do this without skipping a beat though. As I said before, The Last of Us isn't particularly high on my interest list, but there's no way I'm going to skip it. Naughty Dog has earned that level of respect from me after the stellar Uncharted series.

Jesse Miller Staff Writer

12/13/2011 at 10:58 AM

Naughty Dog hasn't steered me wrong yet. I've loved the Crash, Jak and Daxter and Uncharted series. I think this growth to support two teams, similar to what happened at Pixar, will allow for them to develop titles at a more reasonable pace and not potentially ruin a franchise by pumping one out every other year.

TripOpt55

12/13/2011 at 11:14 PM

I was wondering why Straley wasn't the game director on Uncharted 3. Makes sense now. I love the idea of getting Naughty Dog games more often. I would still love to see another Jak game from them, but I am not sure they are interested in going back to that series. I imagine the team who did Uncharted 3's next game will be on PS4. Just a guess though.

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