Naughty Dog tried to develop two games at once, but "did not achieve that at all"

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The studio attempted to establish a multi-game cycle after the launch of Uncharted 2

Uncharted 2
(Image credit: Naughty Dog)

The Last of Us 2 developer Naughty Dog has had its struggles adapting to a multi-game development model, according to its co-president.

Speaking to Game Maker's Notebook (transcribed via VGC), Evan Wells said that while the studio has "multiple projects" on the go, "only one [...] is getting the lion's share of focus at any time." He goes on to explain that "we have one [project] and then some that are in pre-production, or maybe just creeping out of pre-production, but will have to wait until the main focus has completed before we move everybody off of that project."

Wells suggests that Naughty Dog has been trying its hand at the approach for some time, stating that "we tried our first major multi-project development with The Last of Us. At the end of Uncharted 2, Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann went off to start designing [that]. They embarked on that and the idea was we would build a team around it and have two teams going at once, and we just did not achieve that at all. The amount of effort that was required to finish Uncharted 3 at the time was stealing resources away from The Last of Us, and we never got to the point where we had two full productions going."

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.