This week’s talk is about Neil Druckmann, a game designer who works for Naughty Dog. He’s one of my personal favourite game designers, which is why I chose to talk about him. Under his belt are titles like Uncharted and Jak and Daxter, as well as my personal favourite, The Last of Us. If you haven’t played through that game yet, or if you aren’t very familiar with games (although I don’t know how you ended up on this blog if that’s the case), you definitely need to play this cinematic story-driven game, given you are okay with suffering emotional trauma at the hands of pixels. Moving on from my fanboy-esque rant, we’re going to talk about how Neil Druckmann got to where he is. Who doesn’t like a classic success story, right? ‘Started from the bottom’, and all that...
http://www.movienewsguide.com/last-us-2-might-come-bit-earlier-expected/142579
So as you may have guessed, Druckmann didn’t spring out of the womb designing games, pen, paper and laptop in hand. He was born in Israel in 1978, and actually started learning english from playing games by Sierra Entertainment and LucasArts (unfortunately I couldn’t find out specifically which games). After moving to the US in 1989 and graduating high school, he studied at Florida State University, originally studying criminology. He then bounced around different educational paths for a while, being a research assistant for their computer science lab, developed a game called ‘Pink-Bullet’ with his friends, realized “people make games”, and then switched to programming and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and then a masters in entertainment technology.
At the Game Developer Conference (GDC), he met Naughty-Dog co-founder Jason Ruben, who allegedly said he “made the mistake” of giving Druckmann his number. Druckmann then called him incessantly until he agreed to bring him in as a programming intern in 2004. Eventually he was officially hired as a junior programmer on Jak 3. He worked on games for a couple years, but eventually realized what he really wanted is to do design. He asked the co-president Evan Wells to move him to design, but he was very reluctant, saying “we hired you as a programmer”.
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2015/11/10/jak-and-daxter-ps4/
He later agreed to review any design work Druckmann did as long as he did it on his own time. He worked as a designer after-hours for over a year, before wells admitted that he really was quite talented at design. He was moved to do design work on ‘Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune’, writing the story for the game with designer Amy Hennig. After proving himself on that game, he worked again as a designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as a lead game designer this time. Several scenes he worked extensively on, as well as the whole game, gained critical acclaim, proving without a doubt that he was a valuable designer for Naughty Dog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncharted:_Drake%27s_Fortune
After that he actually wrote and directed a couple of comics in 2009, before moving onto his next game, a mystery title originally planned to be the next Jak and Daxter game. For the first time, Naughty Dog split their company into two teams, one working on Uncharted 3 and the other, lead by Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley to make a new Jak and Daxter series. However, early in development the team realized that the game wasn’t inspired and said they felt that if they made this game they would be “doing a disservice to the fans of the franchise”, and so set out into the mysterious unknown of making a new IP, The Last of Us.
http://gazettereview.com/2016/01/studio-could-start-working-on-the-last-of-us-2-after-april-26/
Before making the game, he took acting classes so that he could better work with their actors (or “speak their language” as he put it), which he realized would be one of the most important parts of this story-driven game. The Last of Us was eventually released in 2013 and quickly was acknowledged as a story-masterpiece, receiving critical acclaim and receiving over 200 Game of the Year awards, a staggering success. He worked on the DLC ‘Left Behind’ for The Last of Us, receiving critical acclaim and a second Writers Guild of America award. One scene in particular, involving a kiss between two female characters is considered a breakthrough moment for games. The game industry doesn’t touch on non-heterosexual relationships very often, and when it does it’s often (just like the movie industry) either humorous or sexualized (the latter always involving two women). The ‘Left Behind’ expansion’s quick kiss scene, on the other hand, is a touching moment between two human beings that makes you forget that our society considers it anything out of the ordinary. The Last of Us has a lot of touching or heart-wrenching moments and will often make you question your own morality, as well as having very simple mechanics that make the game incredibly fun and feel very real, which is why Neil Druckmann is one of my favourite game designers.
