Naughty Dog: From Crash Bandicoot to The Last of Us

For a lot of players the PlayStation story starts with an orange bandicoot spinning across the screen. Naughty Dog built Crash Bandicoot into an unofficial mascot for Sony's first console, then did the trick again with the Jak and Daxter platformers. It could have stayed there, a reliable maker of bright, brilliant cartoon games, and been remembered fondly.

Instead it kept reinventing itself. The studio moved from mascot platformers to the globe-trotting blockbuster adventures of Uncharted, then to the quiet, devastating character drama of The Last of Us. Few developers have changed shape so completely while staying so unmistakably themselves. This is that arc, from Crash to Ellie, laid out across the games that got them there.

Turning games into blockbusters

The leap from cartoon platformer to prestige action-adventure was not obvious. When Naughty Dog announced a globe-trotting treasure hunt with a wisecracking hero, it read like a studio reaching for something it had never done. Uncharted worked because Naughty Dog treated performance, staging and pacing as seriously as any film production, motion-captured actors, tightly directed set pieces, banter that actually sounded like people talking. Over four games Nathan Drake's adventures became the reference point for the modern cinematic blockbuster, the thing every other studio was suddenly measured against.