1. Neil Druckmann
The Last Of Us
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Neil Druckmann has been with Naughty Dog for eight years, and has served as a
programmer, designer and now a creative director. As the creative director on The Last
Of Us, he shares overall responsibility for the title with game director Bruce Straley.
Together they make a balanced pair.
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Druckmann’s career at Naughty Dog began when he enrolled for the Entertainment
Technology masters at Carnegie Mellon, and then hassling Naughty Dog co-president
Evan Wells for an internship. He eventually got one against the studio’s regular policy
and was subsequently a programmer on Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing before
moving to the design team for the first Uncharted.
The design work had taken Druckmann a long way from coding, with duties that
included scriptwriting and directing actors. Even in today’s development landscape
these remain unusual specialities, having grown out of Naughty Dog’s pursuit of more
sophisticated, more integrated storytelling. Druckmann had no specific history or
training to aid his scriptwriting.
Writing came naturally to Druckmann but directing was a different matter. He helped
select the leads for The Last Of Us which ended up being Troy Baker, a successful voice
actor and Ashley Johnson, who’s appeared regularly in films and on television for more
than a decade. When it came to working with them, Druckmann signed up to acting
classes, showing that same seriousness and enthusiasm to learn with which he credits
Naughty Dog as a whole.
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Neil wrote and directed The Last Of Us with the expectations to cut through genre
expectations; over the game's three-year development time, it's been as much a case of
taking ideas out as putting them in. The two directors are the bridging point between the
studio’s traditional development side of coders, artists and designers, and the relatively
new performance capture style.