Benson Russell, former developer for Naughty Dog has described the brutal crunch routine behind acclaimed titles such as Uncharted and The Last of Us, and according to the dev, they were pretty much necessary to bring those games to the level of quality that they’re known for. He had left Naughty Dog back in 2015 after a total of eight years of working on iconic games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, and has now opened up on his overall experience in the studio and the crunch culture that has unfortunately become a part of the industry.
In a recent interview with Kiwi Talkz, Russel said that the crunch in the studio started to get worse after the first Uncharted title and even though the leadership at Naughty Dog had tried to fix it in the early 2010s by promoting new guidelines which would keep employees from working beyond midnight, but “when push came to shove, that midnight rule went right out the window.”
“Every meeting after that was always like, ‘Hey, what are we going to do to try and mitigate crunch? How are we going to make this better?'” Russell said. “And eventually it was just an admission in the meeting. It was like, ‘Well, we’ve just come to realize this is what it takes to make games at our level, and we understand, if you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. We understand. We’ll write you a great letter of recommendation.’ That was the answer.”
“The company runs the way it wants to run. You either want to be a part of it, or you don’t. They’re not technically breaking any laws, and it’s not like a requirement, it is a ‘Hey, we really could use your help, please come here,’ and you’re incentivized to do it because your bonuses will be bigger.”
“We had flex hours, where it’s like, you had to be between this time and this time, minimum, so those are core hours so people can overlap, and then you manage that however you need to. The problem is crunch comes in, and then it’s like, all bets are off,” Russell said. “On The Last of Us, I had to drastically cut my crunch time down. I still put in a lot, right? I ramped it up over time, over the last year and a half or so, of the project.”
Interviews like these reveal a darker side of the industry that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should and that’s why they’re truly worthwhile listening to.
Naughty Dog is currently working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet which has been in development for over four years and features a star studded cast of Tati Gabrielle from the Uncharted movie as protagonist Jordan A. Mun, and Kumail Nanjiani of Marvel’s Eternals as another in-game character called Colin Graves.
