Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog, LLC (formerly JAM Software, Inc.) is an American first-party 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 and Way of the Warrior in the early 1990s. The latter game prompted Universal Interactive Studios to sign the duo to a three-title contract and fund the expansion of the company.

Longtime American game designer and producer Mark Cerny convinced Naughty Dog to focus its new resources on creating a character-based platform game that would fully utilize the 3D capabilities of the new systems. Ultimately, this led to the release of Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation in 1996. Naughty Dog developed three Crash Bandicoot games over the next several years. After developing Crash Team Racing, the company began working on Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for the PlayStation 2.

In 2004, Rubin, who had become the company's president, 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 SIE Worldwide Studios's central technology groups. The company's first PlayStation 3 title, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, was released in 2007, with the series tetralogy being completed by 2016. Naughty Dog was previously known for having a history of developing one game at a time, and also one franchise per console, a controversial trend that was criticized by fans. This lasted until Naughty Dog announced a new intellectual property for the PlayStation 3, The Last of Us, which was in development by a secondary team at the studio and released to universal acclaim in 2013.