Playstation's Best

TALKING Jason Rubin
JASON RUBIN IS THE COFOUNDER, along with
Andy Gavin, of developer Naughty Dog. The two
founded their company in 1986 when they were only
sixteen years old, and went on to develop games for
the PC, Amiga, Genesis and 3DO. The team signed
a publishing deal with Universal Interactive in 1994.
Their first title under the deal? Crash Bandicoot.
You signed with Universal in 1994 - what type of direction did
they give you for the games in your contract? Was there ever a push
to develop a mascot-style game?
When Naughty Dog first signed with Universal Studios,
we had a “first look deal.” We decided what type of game
we wanted to make and they had a right to look at them
before anyone else did. The decision to make a character
action game and the basic design of the game predate
Universal Interactive Studios. We actually came up with
the idea while driving from Boston to Los Angeles to
begin working with them. We think it actually happened
in Iowa. When we decided months later to target the
game for the PlayStation, as opposed to the Saturn or
N64, we started talking about making a “Sonic for Sony”
because we were the only company that was working on a
character action game for the system. Sony didn’t see the
game until at least 6 months later.
Sony talked often about their development tools and libraries. In
the early days of the Playstation, how did dev for the Playstation
compare to the other systems you had worked on?
Naughty Dog was never the type of developer that used
tools even when they were provided. We tended to go
“straight to the hardware” regardless of what the hardware
manufacturer offered. Doing so on the PlayStation was
many times simpler than on its successors, however!
Crash was very successful in Japan. How did Naughty Dog crack
that market?
I wish I knew a definitive answer to this question. We
spent a good amount of time listening to our Japanese
producer’s advice, changed content and game balance
specifically for that market, read about Japanese culture,
focus-tested, and spent time in Japan. Sony’s Japanese
marketing efforts for Crash were revolutionary. And since
most Japanese developers were tied to the competing
hardware (Miyamoto-san at Nintendo, and Naka-san at
Sega), we were given a less competitive playing field than
might have been the case. In any event, when the
PlayStation took off, Crash took off. Crash 3 was the
most successful game created and developed by a foreign
studio in Japanese history. It still holds this record as far
as I know.
Where did the idea for the character Crash Bandicoot come from?
We had the idea of taking a common creature, familiar in
name but not look, and “kidnapping” it. Examples of
this are the “Tasmanian Devil” and “RoadRunner” which
are real creatures that most people picture as the Warner
Brothers cartoon characters. Since so many of them were
Australian, we got a book on Australian Marsupials and
picked the “Wombat.” Thankfully we switched to the
Bandicoot, an actual creature that tends to interfere with
Tasmanian and Australian gardening. Since he smashed
boxes, we named him Crash. There were many people
involved in the design including the Naughty Dog team,
Mark Cerny of Universal Interactive Studios, and Charles
Zembillas and Joe Pearson, two Hollywood television and
movie animation designers.
Even as the Playstation welcomed the age of “games for adults,”
Naughty Dog’s titles have remained family friendly. Why is this,
and what is your opinion about the adult content that we saw during
the Playstation era?
The PlayStation broadened the game market, and later
systems and the passage of time continue to broaden the
game market. As a result, a wider variety of games are
being made to serve the more diverse tastes of the market.
This doesn’t make younger fare obsolete. Just because
zombie and other horror movies are popular lately, it would
be odd to ask Pixar why they don’t make horror films.
The media often reported that it was Crash vs. Mario in 1996.
Was that a fair (or meaningful) comparison?
Both fair and meaningless. Many consumers had to make
a decision which system they were going to buy. Crash
and Mario were the top sellers. Deciding which game you
wanted to play might be the deciding factor in which
system you were going to buy. At the same time, they
were very different games trying to achieve very different
goals. I have to admit, the press helped. If you get in the
ring with the champ, the worst you can be when you step
is number two. And that’s a pretty good place to be.