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Naughty Dog's Hennig: Uncharted to Be An Ongoing Franchise

Posted September 23, 2009 by David Radd

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is among the most anticipated PS3 games for the coming holiday season, but many wondered if Naughty Dog might move onto some other franchise after it was finished. When Naughty Dog Creative Director Amy Hennig was asked if Uncharted 2 concluded the story, she all but confirmed that another Uncharted is coming.

"It doesn't concluded the story at all," explained Hennig. "The expectation is with Uncharted is that it can be an ongoing franchise as long as people want more of it. All of these stories are self contained enough that you don't have to play the last one to play this one. Obviously you can get a little more out of it if you have, but [Nathan's] going to have lots of adventures."

Hennig was also asked what it took to work at Naughty Dog and she revealed that the developer has a very atypical company structure. "What we look for in employees, regardless of their level of experience is that they have the right personality type to match and we expect people to be really independent and self-starting because we don't have any management or producers at the company. Everybody's just expected to know what they need to do and get on with it and it's a really organic 'hive mind' structure, which relies on everybody being completely self starting and outspoken; because it's a very collaborative environment, we don't want people to sit there and do their job, we want them to mention if they think something sucks in the game and get out of their chair and tell the person working on it that it sucks so he can fix it."

Considering how management driven most modern titles seem to be, it's refreshing to see a studio run entirely by its creative talent.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.




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