Naughty Dog has grown into a two team studio for the first time in our 25 year history Before 2012 rushes upon us we wanted to take a moment to say Happy Holidays from everyone here at the Naughty Dog kennel! As you can see from our holiday card we’ve welcomed Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us into our cast of characters to play among with Drake, Sully, Elena, Chloe, and our UNCHARTED personalities. The year has brought about tremendous change as Naughty Dog has grown into a two team studio for the first time in our 25 year history. This shift is terrifically exciting as it signals an expanded talent pool in which we can share ideas, know-how, and techniques. As future projects evolve, we will continue to strive to maintain our high Naughty Dog standards and always endeavor to do whatever it takes to raise the bar for gaming.     2011 was a grand adventure as we shipped Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception in November to widespread critical Read more...

Don't forget to watch the SCEE Press Conference TODAY at 10:00 AM PDT. You can find out what time that is in your timezone here: Time Zone Check A live stream can be found on the PlayStation Blog EU at PlayStation Blog EU Don't miss out! Read more...

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the NaughtyDog.com website will be unavailble for an undetermined amount of time on Sunday, August 14, as we do some site maintenance and prep the site for some minor upgrades and a facelift. We'll keep you updated on our Twitter (@Naughty_Dog) when we expect the site to come back up! Read more...

We’re proud to support Gamers Heart Japan – a collection of members from the global videogame community who have come together to help put together a special video – to not only show appreciation for the Japanese videogame industry, but also raise donations to aid in the Red Cross relief efforts for the people of Japan. Check out the video below for a ton of notable folks from the videogame industry talking about why they love Japan and Japanese videogames. Stick around for the whole sixty minutes to check out Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells’s submission and even a special guest appearance from Nathan Drake, Victor Sullivan and Elena Fisher! Don’t forget to head over to www.GamersHeartJapan.com to get more information and to donate to the Red Cross relief efforts!   Read more...

PAX East is right around the corner and we hope that any of you who were interested in attending managed to get tickets before the convention sold out on Monday. We had a great time at the inaugural PAX East last year with our panel Naughty Dog Live & Unleashed - Game Design with the Dogs. So much fun that we wanted to come back even though the studio is massively busy cranking away on UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception. We had the incredible privilege recently to work with 2 Player Productions – you may remember them from PATV Season 1 and the massive buzz surrounding their Minecraft Kickstarter project – on a behind the scenes piece covering the lead up to the announcement of UNCHARTED 3. I know many of you have seen Part 1 of their UNCHARTED 3 behind the scenes piece and have been wondering when Part 2 will be released. Wonder no more – during our PAX East panel with 2 Player Productions, titled The Making of an Announcement – Uncharted 3: Read more...

We hope everyone has had a great first day of GDC 2011 and that some of you were able to attend the absolutely packed GDC Microtalks session yesterday. Today, we've got several sessions we recommend checking out if you're a Naughty Dog fan. The full list of sessions for today with times, locations and descriptions, is reproduced below. Visit our Facebook events page or the GDC Schedule builder if you want to add these sessions to your calendar, export them or print them out. Keep checking back on the GDC11 tag to stay up to date with the sessions and our goings on throughout GDC. Experimental Gameplay SessionsThursday, March 3, 20111:30 PM – 2:30 PMRoom 303, South Hall SpeakersAndy Schatz (Pocketwatch Games), Asher Vollmer (University of Southern California), Jason Rohrer (Independent), Hanford Lemoore (Independent), Michael Brough (Independent), Nicolai Troshinsky (Independent), Mihir Sheth (University of Southern California), Chris Read more...

We're just kicking off the first day of the main conference sessions here at GDC 2011. There's plenty of sessions during each time slot that promise to be interesting, compelling, educational or entertaining. I know it's been difficult for me to narrow down some of the sessions I've wanted to attend! Of course, one of Naughty Dog's own, Richard Lemarchand, is running a panel today that I've always enjoyed - and it's in it's third straight year at GDC! Titled GDC Microtalks 2011: One Hour, Ten Speakers, Hundreds of Fun New Ideas, the panel collects a diverse group of industry notables and gives them a highly constrained forum to discuss their thoughts on this years theme. I've copied the full session description below, so check it out for more details and I hope that some of you will attend! The full list of sessions, along with dates, times, locations and descriptions, is reproduced below. Visit our Facebook events page or the GDC Schedule builder if Read more...

Looking over the full list of sessions, it looks like GDC 2011 is going to be pretty cool conference this year, as the conference celebrates its 25th anniversary. For the occasion, the GDC Advisory Board has even scheduled a great series of Classic Game Postmortems, running the gamut from Pac-Man to Bejeweled, not to mention one on Marble Madness by one of our favorite industry luminaries, Mark Cerny. GDC 2011 is going to be a relatively quiet conference for Naughty Dog as everyone is back at the studio working on UNCHARTED 3 – we’ve only got 8 months left until release! Although we’re not hitting GDC full force like we did last year, there’s still a few sessions you should consider if you happen to be attending the conference. The full list of sessions, along with dates, times, locations and descriptions, is reproduced below. Visit our Facebook events page or the GDC Schedule builder if you want to add these sessions to your calendar, export them Read more...

Naughty Dog celebrates Halloween every year by encouraging the Dogs to show off their creativity by holding a costume contest. As you can see from previous years, many of the Dogs go all out! Back on October 29, we took some video to document this year’s festivities, which you can check out on our YouTube channel or in the embed below. Read more...

Somehow it slipped by me that voting for this year’s Golden Joystick Awards opened back in June. We have to make up for some lost time now – and do what we can to help the awards organizers try to reach their goal of 1.5 million votes by the end of the voting period. In case you’ve never heard about them, the Golden Joystick Awards are hosted by Future Publishing in the UK – where they cover videogames in EDGE Magazine and GamesRadar, among other publications. The event runs every year and all the winners are chosen from votes cast by YOU – fans of all kinds of videogames. Of course, the reason I’m writing this post is that UNCHARTED 2 is among the shortlist of nominees in a few categories and we want your help to come out on top! Head over to the Golden Joystick Awards voting page and vote for your choice for the best videogames in each of the categories. As you vote in each of the categories represented, please consider voting for UNCHARTED 2 in the Read more...

I’m really looking forward to PAX Prime this weekend. It’s going to be awesome to spend time checking out what all the other developers and publishers are showing off, attending a ton of panels, speaking on three panels and – hopefully – running into some of our fans and community members. What we’re NOT up to at PAX Prime is making any kind of announcements… just in case you were wondering. So, what am I bringing up to PAX Prime? A couple of weeks ago, we asked you which UNCHARTED characters you would like to have on an order of 1-inch buttons we were placing. The results of our survey came in last Monday and we immediately placed an order for buttons featuring Nathan Drake, Victor Sullivan, Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer. You check out a photo of the buttons below and on our Flickr page. You’ll notice we’re bringing more than four buttons with us – we’ll reveal the other two buttons, including a limited, very special design, over the next Read more...

I’m heading up to Seattle in a couple of weeks just to check out PAX Prime 2010 (and sit in on a few panels). As the date for PAX Prime started to draw near, we figured I should bring something cool to hand out to our fans over the weekend. We’re going to order a limited run of 1-inch buttons featuring a selection of UNCHARTED characters, but we were having a little bit of a hard time narrowing down which characters we wanted to print on the 4 buttons. That’s where you come in… To help us decide which characters we’ll print on the buttons, check out the survey below and rank, from 1 (least favorite) to 10 (most favorite), your favorite UNCHARTED characters that are listed. The survey will end on Monday, August 23, at around 10:00 AM PDT. Oh, and you have to rank at least 4 characters. [EDIT: The survey has ended - stay tuned to see who made the cut!] Thanks for helping us out—we hope to see you at the show! Read more...

Missed out on attending PAX East this year? Didn’t get into the Naughty Dog panel because of the humongous line? Lucky for you we took (slightly shaky) video of the whole darn thing and we’re making it available to everyone. The point to our panel, “Naughty Dog Live and Unleashed – Game Design with the Dogs,” was to give everyone a peek inside the game design process at Naughty Dog. I joined three of our game designers – Richard Lemarchand, Jacob Minkoff, and Justin Richmond – on a frosty weekend in Boston to take on the challenge of developing a new gameplay sequence in UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune. We wanted to show off the same highly collaborative, iterative design process that we use all the time at Naughty Dog to design a new sequence, with some specific game and story goals in mind, to take place between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. To keep in the spirit of being highly collaborative, we also opened up the floor to audience questions and suggestions Read more...

Back in December 2009, Pyramind Studios hosted an exclusive behind-the-scenes event on the making of the music for UNCHARTED 2. For this event, Pyramind brought together a bunch of folks from SCEA, Skywalker Sound and the composer for our game, Greg Edmonson to discuss their experiences working on this production. Hosted by Paul Lipson, COO/Composer at Pyramind Studios, the list of attendees included: Greg Edmonson - UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves Composer Leslie Ann Jones - Director of Music Recording & Scoring, Skywalker Sound Clint Bajakian - Senior Music Manager, SCEA Jonathan Mayer - Music Manager, SCEA Scott Hanau - Music Editor, SCEA Marc Senasac - Music Engineer, SCEA Joel Yarger - Music Engineer, SCEA Just a few days ago, they posted a video of highlights from An Evening with the UNCHARTED 2 Music Team – we’ve embedded the video below or you can head straight to the Pyramind YouTube channel. I think you’ll want to check it out! Read more...

Just over a couple of months ago, Ballistic Publishing revealed that they were releasing The Art of Uncharted 2 – an in-depth look at the concept art, production art and artistic process during the development of UNCHARTED 2. The Art of Uncharted 2 comes in three flavors – Soft Cover, Special Edition, and a Limited Folio Edition – each increasing in price to go along with the nicer materials and, in the case of the Limited Folio Edition, exclusivity since only 200 signed and numbered copies will be sold. We got copies of all three versions in the studio recently and thought it was only fitting to take a bunch of photos and put together an unboxing video below so you can get a good look at what you get when purchasing The Art of Uncharted 2. Visit our Unboxing The Art of Uncharted 2 Flickr set to see shots of the exterior and interior pages of The Art of Uncharted 2 Special Edition and Limited Folio Edition. The Art of Uncharted 2 is now available for Read more...

After about a week of a “soft-launch,” we’re proud to announce the official launch of the Naughty Dog community forums! You can access the forums via our main navigation at top of any NaughtyDog.com page or by clicking this link: http://forums.naughtydog.com/. We’ve got active discussions already going about Naughty Dog, UNCHARTED 2, UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune, the Jak and Daxter franchise and even an off-topic forum. I’m definitely making a point to be very active on the forums, answering your questions and contributing to the discussions, and we’ll have other Dogs drop in from time to time. You can identify us by both the Naughty Dog paw next to our names and Naughty Dog dev, Naughty Dog moderator or Naughty Dog admin as our title. I would also make sure you were familiar (and regularly check) our forum rules and guidelines to keep all discussions on track and respectful to each other. It will go a long way to keeping Read more...

Naughty Dog is traveling across the country to attend PAX East this coming weekend. We couldn’t be more excited to fly out and participate in this inaugural outing of PAX East and meet our fans. The PAX East schedule is looking pretty awesome with a ton of great panels and sessions every day. We’re looking forward to our panel on Saturday evening, where we show you a little bit of how we do game design at Naughty Dog. Be sure to show up early as sessions tend to fill up quickly! Naughty Dog LIVE – Game Design with the Dogs Naga Theatre Saturday, 4:00pm Come take a peek into how we get games made at Naughty Dog. Three Naughty Dog game designers hold a game design meeting right in the middle of PAX East to tackle the challenge of developing a new gameplay sequence in the UNCHARTED universe, and to make it work for both a single-player campaign and multiplayer modes. We’ll take you through the same highly collaborative, iterative, no-holds-barred Read more...

With all the activity around the Game Developers Conference last week, you may have missed a really important (well, in our opinion anyway) announcement from Ballistic Publishing revealing the imminent release of The Art of UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves art books. We don’t have any copies in the studio yet, but we saw some unbound production versions just prior to GDC and the quality of the paper and printing is really quite exceptional—something Ballistic is well-known for. I’ll post some photos that won’t do the book justice at all when we get some copies in at the studio. The Limited Folio edition, of only 200 will be printed, throws in some sweet extras beyond the standard paperback and the leather-bound Special Edition. The Limited Folio Edition of the art book is bound in black suede leather with gold-embossed cover art, and a matching hand-crafted, black suede leather-bound presentation case with a ribbon. Also included is a certificate of Read more...

Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra was on had at the GAME British Academy Video Game Awards ceremony in London today, representing Naughty Dog as UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves wins four awards! Cheers were heard around Naughty Dog as many of us were watching the live stream of the event. We’re all extremely happy and proud to have won the prestigious BAFTA awards in four categories: Action Original Score Story Use of Audio Congratulations also go out to our friends and former colleagues at Cambridge Studio, Infinity Ward, Rocksteady Games, thatgamecompany and Valve for their respective well-deserved BAFTA wins - 2009 was an awesome year for exceedingly high-quality video games. Photo of Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra courtesy of Bryony Stewart-Seume from This Is My Joystick! Read more...

The GAME British Academy Video Games Awards are what I believe the last awards show to celebrate games which were released in 2009. They’re pretty darn prestigious too, as they are part of the overall British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards. Evan and Christophe flew over to London, United Kingdom, to attend the awards and represent Naughty Dog. We’re proud to say that UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves is nominated in 10 categories: Action Artistic Achievement Best Game Gameplay Multiplayer Original Score Story Use of Audio Use of Online GAME Award of 2009 The GAME Award of 2009 is selected by the British public from among the ten titles shortlisted by an expert panel of games journalists and gamers. You can watch the GAME British Academy Video Games Awards ceremony LIVE at their website. The ceremony starts at 1:45 PM PDT / 8:45 PM GMT (what time is that in my city?). Be sure head over later today and cheer us on! Read more...

Naughty Dog programmer John Hable presented a talk called “UNCHARTED 2: HDR Lighting” to close out GDC10 during the last timeslot of the final day. During his talk John referenced a two-part presentation by Pal-Kristian Engstad, our Lead Engine Programmer, which covers optimizing for the SPUs. We’ve linked each part of that presentation below for those who attended John’s session and those who are following at home (or coming in via GDC Vault access). Introduction to SPU Optimizations - Part 1 Introduction to SPU Optimizations - Part 2 Read more...

If you’re still in San Francisco this Saturday for GDC, and haven’t already succumbed to the effects of all the GDC activities, feel free to drop by any one of our four sessions today. This is also your last day to drop by the Naughty Dog booth at the Career Pavilion to ask any and all questions you may have about seeking employment at Naughty Dog and our studio culture. In that vein, if you’re looking to work in the game industry, or if you want some tips on how to make yourself a more attractive candidate, may I suggest you check out game designer Jacob Minkoff’s session, “Getting Noticed: Why You Need an Online Portfolio and How to Make One.” Saturday (March 13, 2010) 10:30am - 11:30am Uncharted 2 Character Pipeline: An In-depth Look at the Creation of U2’s Characters Richard Diamant (Lead Character Artist, Naughty Dog Inc.), Judd Simantov (Lead Character Technical Director, Naughty Dog Inc) Room 135, North Hall Some Read more...

There are three sessions today, Friday, March 12, at GDC10 which have participation by Naughty Dogs and/or is about UNCHARTED 2. As yesterday, if you’re at GDC10 this week, we’d love to see you come by and attend! Don’t forget to also stop by our booth at the GDC Career Pavilion where we are holding a business card raffle for great (and at least one item of relevant) merch. Friday (March 12, 2010) 9:00am - 10:00am GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas! Richard Lemarchand (Game Designer, Naughty Dog), Ian Bogost (Associate Professor, The Georgia Institute of Technology), Chaim Gingold (levity lab), Gary Penn (Guru, Denki), Sam Roberts (Festival Director, indiecade.com), Margaret Robertson (Consultant and writer, Lookspring), Kellee Santiago (President and Co Founder, thatgamecompany), Suzanne Seggerman (President, Games for Change), Jesse Schell (ETC Carnegie Mellon, Schell Games), Jane Pinckard (Business Development, Read more...

After the first full day of main conference sessions, many of us—and I think all the Dogs at GDC—will head to attend the Independent Games Festival Awards and Game Developer Choice Awards. We’re especially excited for the GDCA as UNCHARTED 2 is nominated in seven categories: Game of the Year Best Writing Best Game Design Best Technology Best Visual Arts Innovation Award Best Audio The IGF Awards are significant and you shouldn’t miss them either—they recognize the best entries into the Independent Games Festival and can give a great glimpse into some of the awesome things that come from being small and passionate—showcasing interesting game play innovations and game developers to watch. Best of all, both awards ceremonies will be streamed back-to-back LIVE from GameSpot’s GDC hub at http://gdc.gamespot.com/. Be sure to head over there at 6:30 PM PST (what time is that in my city?) to watch the awards events—and Read more...

Today, Thursday, March 11, is the first day of the GDC10 main conference and Naughty Dog figures prominently in three sessions today. If you’re at GDC10 this week (and reading this instead of attending sessions), we’d love to see you come by. Thursday (March 11, 2010) 1:30pm - 2:30pm Among Friends - An Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Post-Mortem Richard Lemarchand (Game Designer, Naughty Dog) Room 134, North Hall Naughty Dog faced many entirely new challenges in the creation of UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves - in expanding our gameplay through the use of new traversal, combat and AI technologies, introducing characters that shed new light on our hero Nathan Drake, and tackling our first foray into multiplayer in four years. Co-Lead Game Designer Richard Lemarchand will candidly describe how we tackled the problems that we faced, and how the studio’s philosophy of collaboration, open communication and investment of responsibility in the people who Read more...

Naughty Dog has its own booth at the GDC Career Pavilion this year—you can see our concept for our booth in the image above. It won’t look exactly like that, but it’s still pretty sweet looking. If you’re at GDC this year and you’re curious about what it’s like to work at Naughty Dog, or you’re seeking employment and Naughty Dog is a place you think you may be a good fit for, please stop by our booth to say hello and ask questions.We’ll be glad to answer your questions and tell you about nearly everything there is to know about Naughty Dog. You can stop by even if we don’t have the position best suited for your skills currently posted on our Careers page—so don’t let that stop you. If you’re an artist, we will take a look and give feedback on artists portfolios BUT bring flat books ONLY if you’re going to come by. If you want to apply for a job, the best place is to contact us via our job Read more...

Many of us at Naughty Dog are up in San Francisco to attend GDC10 this week. The Dogs are participating in ten sessions this week, covering just about every aspect of the development of UNCHARTED 2, along with some hiring advice and the continuing run of the GDC Microtalks session. We’re also attending this year’s Game Developer Choice Awards on Thursday, March 11, as we hope to win some awards from the seven categories we’ve been nominated in Naughty Dog is also going have its own booth at the Career Pavilion—more on that and why you would want to swing by tomorrow. We’ve got the full list of sessions we’re participating in, along with links to descriptions below. Visit our Facebook events page or the GDC Schedule builder if you want to add these sessions to your calendar, export them or print them out. Keep checking back via the GDC10 tag to stay up to date on GDC and what the Dogs are up to throughout the week! Thursday Read more...

Just one more quick reminder—if you’re local to Los Angeles, drop by the “Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog” opening reception on Saturday, March 6, at the Gnomon Gallery. I’ll definitely be there and I have it on good authority that a good number of other Dogs will be there. Feel free to come by and mingle—it’s open to the public and (I believe) it’s free. Full details, including the address can be found on our first reminder post from earlier this week. (Yes, the bee-like creature makes yet another appearance!) Read more...

About a month ago we let you know that a bunch of artists at Naughty Dog will be showing their art at the Gnomon Gallery as part of a group show. The date for the opening reception is drawing near and we just wanted to remind you in case you live nearby or will happen to be visiting the Los Angeles area. So, if you happen to be near the Los Angeles area for any reason on Saturday, March 6, 2010, feel free to drop by the Gnomon Gallery from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM to attend the opening reception of “Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog.” You can find out more about our gallery show and other events at the Gnomon Gallery on their website www.gnomongallery.com. The Gnomon Gallery is located at 1015 N. Caheunga Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90038. We’ve included a handy Google map too: View Larger Map Read more...

Naughty Dog is proud to reveal that after 6 years in our current studio space, it’s time for the Dogs to move on to a bigger, better Kennel. As of March 1, 2010, we’ll be based out of our new studio less than 500 feet away from our current space. We’ve built out our new studio from a raw and open floorplan to a killer new studio that provides us with more flexibility in space, layout and adjusting to fluctuating staffing needs – not to mention there are some significant upgrades to help us keep developing cutting-edge, award-winning games. As I was talking to our Co-President Evan Wells about the history of Naughty Dog and the several moves the studio has made in its lifetime – more on that later – he mentioned that he felt our new space “positions Naughty Dog perfectly to adapt to the demands of developing PlayStation games that continue to raise the bar for our industry for the next decade and beyond.” Needless to say, all of the Dogs are Read more...

Despite a late night after receiving our ten wins at the Interactive Achievement Awards (we’re still beaming, by the way), we managed to get up in the morning and close out the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010. Today’s sessions had Randy Pitchford explaining the history, overall development philosophy and business management of Gearbox Software; John Schappert from EA promising not to tell us how much money he’s made and discussing EA’s publishing philosophy in these more difficult economic times; Mike Yuen from Zeebo talking about how his company is looking for success in under-served markets while fostering low development costs; Joe Madureira and David Adams from Vigil Games taking us through their development process of Darksiders as an independent studio; and, to conclude the day and the summit, Greg Short and Geoffrey Zatkin from EEDAR providing quantitative data and analysis on this console generation by looking at trends and comparisons in a variety Read more...

Even though we’ve been out celebrating, this news just can’t wait. Earlier this evening, eight Naughty Dogs including myself, attended the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony as part of the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010. We didn’t know what to expect, as we were nominated in an unprecedented 15 categories and up against some very worthy games in every category—2009 was an incredible year for gaming as every game nominated was great enough to win an award. But I know we all wanted to win something, to be recognized, with the hope that the members of our industry, the members of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences thought our game was worthy of recognition, hopefully of the Game of the Year kind. Boy, did they. We’re proud, honored and exceedingly flattered to have UNCHARTED 2 nab 10 awards this evening: Game of the Year Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction Adventure Game of the Year Outstanding Achievement in Read more...

We’re about halfway through a very long day at the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010 today. Our own Richard Lemarchand kicked off the sessions for the day with his talk, “Uncharted 2 - How to Fly By the Seat of Your Pants Without Crapping Them.” His talk presented an overview of how Naughty Dog operates as a studio and an inside look at what our development process is like. I hope it was interesting to many of the developers and business folk in the audience, because I like to believe we have fairly unique and unorthodox development process, but one that at a glance may freak many people out (especially producers) used to more rigid development processes. Richard can put it far better than I could ever put it, even though I’m seen him speak about our process a handful of times already. In a nutshell, he explained how we value a highly collaborative and iterative process that can seem to outsiders extremely chaotic and on the verge of falling apart. But that Read more...

Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer on UNCHARTED 2, and I just arrived in Las Vegas several hours ago, where both of us will attend our first D.I.C.E. Summit. The easiest way to explain the D.I.C.E. Summit is that it’s kind of like a mini-GDC focusing on the business of making games, but really a bit more on a high level. It’s notable industry figures giving us their perceptions and big picture about making and selling games right now. And there’s no shortage of notables—just in our first session today you could spot key folks from Epic, Portalarium, Valve, Silicon Knights, Insomniac, Ubisoft, EA, Activision, and on and on and on. Not to mention we’re all essentially trapped in the same hotel the conference is at, so it’s a great time to meet new people, see old friends, catch up and share ideas, in a quieter, more subdued environment than other industry events. I really enjoyed one of the opening sessions today, “Hot Read more...

UNCHARTED 2 Soundtrack in Stores Today - PlayStation.Blog Greg Edmonson’s wonderful original score for UNCHARTED 2 was released on a physical format this week—the CD, if you’re curious. The PlayStation.Blog is hosting streaming previews of three until now unreleased tracks to the original soundtrack: “Take That!,” “Tunnel Vision,” and “The Heist.” If you picked up the original soundtrack already on iTunes or elsewhere, you can head over to Sumthing Digital website to purchase the tracks for download individually. Thank You for a Great 2009 - PlayStation.Blog President and CEO of SCEA, Jack Tretton, posted a recap of how well the PlayStation brand fared in 2009 (hint: really, really well)—in it he reveals that we’re doing really well too, mentioning that UNCHARTED 2 is “closing in on three million copies sold worldwide.” That’ll be a great milestone to pass and we’ll keep doing Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Games of the decade: Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells - USA Today: Game Hunters USA Today’s Game Hunters blog asked our Co-President Evan Wells to pick his top 5 favorite games of the decade and tell us a little about why those games are important to him. How I Made It: Amy Hennig - Los Angeles Times Ben Fritz came by the studio a couple of weeks ago to talk to Amy and the get inside story on how she went from film school grad student to Creative Director at Naughty Dog. Even Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City makes a brief mention! The Bitbag 2009 Editor’s Choice Award Winners - The Bitbag The Bigbag reveals their Editor’s Choice Award winners for 2009. We’ve really set the bar high for ourselves for future projects—we got 5 more Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Most of the chatter online this week just covered our announcement last Friday regarding the release of the UNCHARTED 2 PSN Demo and the PlayStation Heroes Skin Pack, but we did find one thing that we didn’t write ourselves… Kotaku’s 2009 Game of the Year - Kotaku After much deliberation among the staff, and a good dose of healthy debate, Kotaku finally reveals their Game of the Year for 2009. We’re pleased as peach it’s UNCHARTED 2—I think we can officially say we’re the “must have game of 2009” now that we’ve got some 32 Game of the Year awards to our name. Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog at the Gnomon Gallery - NaughtyDog.com A bunch of the Dogs have been working hard trying to get this group show at Read more...

We’re extremely proud to let you know that nineteen artists from Naughty Dog will have their own group art show! They’ll be displaying a broad variety of their own art, nicely printed and displayed, at the Gnomon Gallery—which is affiliated with the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. The show starts with an opening reception on Saturday, March 6, 2010, from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Full information on the Gnomon Gallery, including location and hours, and the artists included in the show can be found here. Drop by if you’re in the area and check it out and I’m sure there’ll be more than a few Naughty Dogs who will also drop by—I’m planning on it. If you can’t make it, I hear the show will run into April sometime. We’ll keep you posted as we get more details. Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. WGA opts for vidgame sequels - Variety Friday morning, Variety posted the first report I could find of the Writers Guild of America awards for videogame writing. We’re glad to see UNCHARTED 2 and our own Amy Hennig, make the list this year. You would recognize the other nominees as some of the bigger titles that came out this year—Assassin’s Creed II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Wet and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The WGA will announce the winner on February 20, 2009 during their awards ceremonies. Congratulations, Amy! GeekTown’s Top 5 Games of the Year 2009 - GeekTown GeekTown counts down their best games of 2009—while it has a slightly few different entries in the top 5 than we’ve seen so far, UNCHARTED 2 makes the number 2 Read more...

We wished everyone happy holidays over on the PlayStation.Blog back on the first day of the year, but unlike our friends at Insomniac, we neglected to post the image we put on our holiday cards to share with everybody. Some of you got to see it when word originally got out about our 2009 holiday cards. Since then, we’ve gotten a bunch of requests to post up a high-quality image of our holiday card and we’ve done just that. You can see (and grab) our holiday card image from our Flickr photostream. In the spirit of that, we wanted to share some of the holiday cards we received at the studio below—I really love the brushstroke signature of our one colleagues in Japan. Oh, and since it’s been more than a few weeks since we took off for the holidays, unfortunately we only had a few to show as many cards made their way back to the respective homes of the Dogs. Enjoy! Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Analysis: The Sexual Politics Of Uncharted 2 - Gamasutra Writing for Gamasutra, Tom Cross takes a worthwhile look at the characters—specifically Drake, Elena and Chloe—in UNCHARTED 2, analyzing the archtypes they occupy and the underlying motivations they have as it relates to gender and their relaltionships with each other. Games Of The Decade: 2009 - CVG CVG lists their games of the decade by year—UNCHARTED 2 takes the honors against the usual, but excellent other titles which came out this year, including Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin’s Creed II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. PushSquare’s Playstation Game Of The Year ‘09: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - PushSquare Continuing our flattering run of Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Eurogamer’s Game of the Year 2009 - Eurogamer Eurogamer staff discuss the publication’s pick for the top game released in 2009—our own UNCHARTED 2. Eurogamer Reader’s Top 50 Games of 2009 - Eurogamer Eurogamer readers voted on their top games of this year. Echoing Eurogamer staff, we’re pleased as punch to see that they feel UNCHARTED 2 also deserves the top spot. Naughty Dog and Uncharted 2 rule the holidays - Examiner.com Matt at Examiner.com posts the holiday card we sent out to journalists, friends and partners last month. Reaction Time: Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells Reflects on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - The Feed - G4 After receiving X-Play’s award for Game of the Year, G4 takes some extra time to have a very Read more...

Last week was a busy week for the Dogs as we had two awards shows to attend, but it definitely had its rewards! Without a doubt, the most prominent video game awards show currently is the SPIKE Video Game Awards – partly because it’s the only show to be televised live and it’s been gaining in exposure year after year. Therefore it meant a lot for us to be nominated for a leading eight awards when the nominees and categories were announced in late November. December 12 couldn’t get here fast enough. On Saturday night, Amy, Bruce, Christophe and Evan all headed over to L.A. Live to attend the SPIKE VGA 2009 while a bunch of Dogs went to the PlayStation.Blog community event and viewing party to mingle with fans and watch the show. I know that we all had our fingers crossed that we would walk away with some awards to cap off a crazy year which included finishing UNCHARTED 2, getting awesome review scores and stellar sales. You can read Evan’s behind the scenes Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves PS3 review - Adrenaline Vault Adrenaline Vault reviews UNCHARTED 2. Gamers getting older, games more mature - Toronto Sun The Toronto SUN names UNCHARTED 2 #5 in their round up of the Top 10 video games of the decade. We like the sound of that. Game of the Year Nominees - Neutronic Fusion Neutronic Fusion names their nominees for Game of the Year. Video game voice actors worry they’re getting shortchanged - Los Angeles Times Richard Verrier and Ben Fritz take a look at the state of the business for video game voice actors for the Los Angeles Times, speaking with Amy Hennig among other folks for their article. Gaming with Twitter and Facebook - Ganatomy Ganatomy takes a look at the the increasing integration between gaming and Read more...

Can you believe it was just three weeks ago when we let you know that UNCHARTED 2 and Naughty Dog were nominated in a ton of categories for the SPIKE 2009 Video Game Awards. Time sure has flown and the VGA 2009 show is almost here. In fact, it’s TOMORROW, Saturday, December 12, so be sure to tune in to watch it live on SPIKE at 8 PM. To celebrate the awards show this year, PlayStation.Blog has something special up their sleeves for people in and near Los Angeles (or willing to travel here, of course)—they’ve secured a location and set-up one of their world famous Meet-Ups that will also serve as a viewing party for the VGA 2009. Of course, this is right in our backyard (or is it front yard?) so to celebrate our leading EIGHT nominations, along with the other nine nominations by our friends within the PlayStation family, we’re going to be there. We’ve already secured several Dogs to attend along with myself to meet our fans, sign your stuff, Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Behind the Scenes with the SCEA Music Department - PlayStation.blog PlayStation.blog goes behind the scenes with the SCEA Music Department to shed some light on how music in games gets picked and made. This look has the SCEA Music team discuss several parts of working with us and making music for UNCHARTED 2, including working at Skywalker Sound to record the orchestral pieces. Our composer, Greg Edmonson also makes an appearance in the video which we’ve embedded below as well. Reynolds, Lemarchand To Speak At DICE Summit - Gamasutra Additional speakers were revealed for the DICE Summit 2010 in Las Vegas. Among them is our own Richard Lemarchand, one of two Lead Designers on UNCHARTED 2. The DICE Summit is scheduled to take place from February 17 to February Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. (This week, we’ve observed this post until Tuesday due to the Thanksgiving holiday.) The Engadget Show 003 - Engadget Chris Grant from Joystiq joins the Engadget show to discuss what good this holiday in gaming. Chris starts discussing video games around the 34:00 mark, mentioning that UNCHARTED 2 is his personal pick for the year (to no audience reaction—come on audience!). The rest of this well-produced show, in front of the aforementioned live audience no less, covers all sorts of tech-y things and is well worth the watch. Bonus Round Episode 310 Part 3 - GameTrailers Infinity Ward joins Geoff Keighley for this episode of Bonus Round to cover off an all things Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, not to mention the past and future of the studio. When Read more...

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web. Reflecting on UNCHARTED 2: How They Did It - Gamasutra Kris Graft talks to Co-Lead Game Designer Neil Druckmann to discuss the development of UNCHARTED 2, what it feels like now that we’re done with the game and the reception the game has gotten from game critics and our fans alike. Vote today for PlayStation’s 17 VGA Nominees - PlayStation.blog SPIKE TV announced their nominees for the SPIKE 2009 VGA Awards and the PlayStation family received 17 nominations across a broad range of categories. We’re real happy to say that UNCHARTED 2 leads all the PlayStation title—actually have more nominations than any other game—with a record 8 nominations, including Game of the Year. UNCHARTED 2 dev talks Twitter - GameSpot AU GameSpot Australia chats Read more...

On November 19, SPIKE TV announced the first details of the SPIKE 2009 VGA Awards, along with a list of nominees in 28 categories. Reading over the nominees, it was awesome for us to see that UNCHARTED 2 picked up eight nominations, including helping us end up in the running for the Studio of the Year award: Game of the Year Studio of the Year (Naughty Dog) Best Graphics Best Action Adventure Game Best PS3 Game Best Original Score Best Voice (Claudia Black as Chloe Frazer) Best Voice (Nolan North as Nathan Drake) If you haven’t voted already, be sure to head over to the 2009 VGA Awards page and vote now. We’d be just thrilled if Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 ended up as your picks for this year’s awards! Read more...

Didn’t get enough behind the scenes videos on your UNCHARTED 2 disc? Well, there’s plenty more where that came from—five more videos to be precise—bringing the total to twelve. Over the past couple of weeks, the PlayStation YouTube channel has been steadily adding additional Behind the Scenes videos to the seven already available as unlockable content within UNCHARTED 2. These extra videos go further into how our cinematics process worked and gives you a look at all the actors in UNCHARTED 2, details about the rehearsals, our motion capture process, and a look at how we did A.D.R. on the game. We’ve put all of the videos together in a handy YouTube playlist or you can watch them all in the video embedded below. Hope you enjoy them! Read more...

Everyone at Naughty Dog is extremely excited as UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves was released worldwide this week! Of course, some of you were already playing (and completed) UNCHARTED 2 as early as last week from copies you snagged during our awesome cinema events in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles last week – or perhaps by some other, more mysterious means… Regardless if you’ve been playing for a week or you just came home from the store, I can say that everyone at Naughty Dog has been looking forward for nearly two years to the day that UNCHARTED 2 is finally in the hands of our fans. We’ve had a great run so far, winning a ton of awards and finding out that critics really, REALLY liked our game, but now we get to see and hear what all of you think about it. To do that, we’ll be reading as many forum posts, blog posts and tweets as we can in the next few months and beyond! I can speak for everyone at Naughty Dog when I say that Read more...

Things are definitely looking a little bit different around here lately, don’t you think? As you can see, we’ve made some changes and improvements on NaughtyDog.com to help us start talking directly with some of the most important people we know – you. Whether you got to know us all the way back during our Crash Bandicoot years, joined Jak and Daxter on their adventures on the PS2 or, more recently, helped Nathan Drake search for El Dorado, you’ll know that one of the things we treasure most are our fans. Over the years, we have received countless letters and e-mails, and even a few special visits to our studio, and we’ve constantly thought of how we can open up Naughty Dog a little bit more and give you the opportunity to see what happens inside our studio. We’ll be updating the blog regularly about everything we can at Naughty Dog, even if it’s not specifically related to the game we’re currently working on. We’ll read every single comment you leave Read more...