Andy Gavin, Jason Rubin and a name changed in 1989.

Naughty Dog began under another name. English Wikipedia says the company, today Naughty Dog, LLC, was founded as JAM Software in 1984 by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, together with a third partner, Mike Goyet. The encyclopedia says the acronym originally stood for “Jason, Andy and Mike”, and that after Goyet lost interest and Rubin and Gavin bought back his share, it was redefined as “Jason and Andy’s Magic”. The pair wrote software for the Apple II and, at the start, worked from their family homes.

The early catalogue was small and varied. Wikipedia lists Math Jam, a self-published arithmetic game sold to local schools in Ziploc bags; a skiing game, Ski Crazed, released through the publisher Baudville in 1987; and Dream Zone, a graphic adventure from 1988 that was ported from the Apple II to MS-DOS, Amiga and Atari ST. The encyclopedia says Rubin and Gavin then parted ways with Baudville and signed with Electronic Arts after sending the publisher a copy of Dream Zone.

The new name arrived with that contract. According to Wikipedia, JAM Software was rebranded as Naughty Dog while Keef the Thief was in development, and that game, released in 1989 for the Amiga, Apple IIGS and MS-DOS, was released under the new name. The encyclopedia says the change was required by EA because the JAM Software name was trademarked in Australia. The replacement came from Rubin’s sketchbook: Wikipedia describes a doodle by Rubin of a cartoon dog wearing sunglasses on a beach, which he proposed as the company name, and records that EA founder Trip Hawkins had reservations about how it would sell.

The name stuck through a run of platforms. Wikipedia says the role-playing game Rings of Power came out on the Sega Genesis in 1992, and that the fighting game Way of the Warrior, self-funded and made for the 3DO console at Hawkins’s encouragement, won the studio a three-game contract with Universal Interactive Studios and was released in 1994.

Universal, a bandicoot and Sony from 2001.

The Universal deal moved the studio across the country. Rolling Stone, in an oral history published on 9 September 2016, reported that in the summer of 1994, after finishing Way of the Warrior, Rubin and Gavin sold the rights to Universal Studios and agreed to move from Boston to the company’s facility in Los Angeles. There they began work on a character platform game for Sony’s new PlayStation. The magazine named Mark Cerny, then at Universal, among the people Rubin credited with the project.

The same account shows how much weight the founders placed on their name. Rubin told Rolling Stone that at one point Universal, the game’s producer, planned to take over the project, keep the studio from attending E3 and rename the character Willie the Wombat. He said he walked into a Universal vice president’s office with the team and set out terms: “This is a Naughty Dog production. Naughty Dog’s name is going to be on it,” and “The name is Crash Bandicoot.” He told the magazine that the studio won the argument. Rubin also recalled that, during a meeting with Sony’s senior management in Tokyo, the artist Charlotte Francis quickly revised the character art in Photoshop, closing Crash’s wide grin so that he looked less aggressive.

Sony became the owner in 2001. In a release dated 22 January 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment America said it had acquired Naughty Dog, Inc., described as an independent developer based in Santa Monica, and that the studio would become a wholly owned subsidiary operating under the Naughty Dog brand name. Sony said Gavin and Rubin, then co-presidents, would continue to run day-to-day operations under Shuhei Yoshida, and Rubin said the two companies had worked together as publisher and developer for six years. Sony has owned the studio since that acquisition.

The founders later handed over. Wikipedia says Gavin and Rubin decided in 2002 to leave and began a two-year transition of leadership to Evan Wells and Stephen White; the pair departed in 2004, and Wells became co-president in 2005. The encyclopedia says Christophe Balestra succeeded White in 2006 and stepped down in 2017, after which Wells continued as president.

A studio name that stayed on the box.

A game studio’s identity usually reaches players before the game does. The company logo appears on a splash screen or a short animated ident in the seconds while software loads, then again on store pages, trailers, packaging and the credits. Because those seconds repeat every time someone opens a game, the ident tends to be short, legible on a phone or a television, and quiet enough that it does not compete with the title that follows. Animation studios use the same device in front of their films, often with a brief piece of motion or a sound cue that returns from release to release.

Much of the visible branding, though, belongs to the work rather than the company. Characters, mascots and title logos carry the recognition, and a studio name may sit underneath them in small type. Some companies let a recurring character stand in for the studio; others keep the studio mark plain so that each new game or film can look different. Ownership changes add another layer: when a studio is bought or becomes independent, the parent’s mark may appear beside its own or drop away. For designers, the practical point is that a studio identity is a set of placements — a splash screen, a store icon, a credit line, a website — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its moment.

Druckmann, Santa Monica and series as dated facts.

Leadership changed again in the 2020s. Wikipedia says Neil Druckmann was promoted to vice president in March 2018 and to co-president alongside Wells on 4 December 2020. Game World Observer reported on 12 July 2023 that Wells had announced, in a post on the Naughty Dog website, that he would retire, saying he had discussed the decision with the studio’s leads for more than a year. The trade site said Wells had joined in 1998 during the production of the third Crash Bandicoot game, and that Druckmann, in a separate post, said the reshaped leadership team reflected “the next chapter for Naughty Dog.” Wikipedia says Druckmann became studio head and head of creative.

The studio’s output can be read as a sequence of dated releases. Wikipedia lists Crash Bandicoot in 1996, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for the PlayStation 2, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in 2007, The Last of Us in 2013 and The Last of Us Part II in 2020, and says the studio is developing Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet for the PlayStation 5. The encyclopedia adds that Naughty Dog is home to the ICE Team, one of PlayStation Studios’ central technology groups.

For designers, the clearest identity lesson sits in the studio’s name rather than in any single game. The name came from a drawing, survived a change of publisher, a move from Boston to Los Angeles and a sale to Sony, and was named in Sony’s 2001 acquisition announcement as the brand under which the studio would operate. During the making of Crash Bandicoot, by Rubin’s account to Rolling Stone, keeping that name on the game was worth a confrontation.

For a design guide, Naughty Dog shows how a developer can keep a distinct studio name inside a larger platform owner, keeping its own name alongside the parent company’s. Compare Sony Pictures Animation, another Sony studio, and Bungie, another console-game studio. For this guide we use studio black, ember orange and rust with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Naughty Dog’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.