Naughty Dog is an American video game company founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1986, and based in Santa Monica, California. It was acquired by Sony in 2001.
Gavin and Rubin produced a sequence of progressively more successful games, including Rings of Power for the Sega Genesis and Way of the Warrior for the 3DO. The latter was created with low-budget but still plausible offering prompted Universal Interactive Studios to sign the duo to a three-title deal and fund the expansion of the company. Mark Cerny, who had produced Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega, convinced Naughty Dog to focus its new resources on creating a character-based platform game that would fully exploit the 3D capabilities of the new systems.
Ultimately, this led to the release of Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation on August 31, 1996. Naughty Dog developed three Crash Bandicoot sequels over the next several years. In January 2001, it was announced Sony would acquire Naughty Dog.
After developing the fourth Crash Bandicoot game (Crash Team Racing), the company began working on Jak and Daxter for PlayStation 2.
The Jak and Daxter series of games were largely written in Andy Gavin's custom dialect of the Lisp programming language called GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp). This is likely due to Andy's exposure to Lisp at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. GOAL itself is written in Allegro Common Lisp from Franz, Inc.apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lhtml" target="_blank">http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lhtml
In 2004, Naughty Dog's studio president and co-founder, Jason Rubin, left the company http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=dev&aid=3094 to work on a new project named _Iron and the Maiden. blank">http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148865&did=1
In addition to their inhouse game team, Naughty Dog is home to the _ICE Team, one of Sony's World Wide Studios central technology groups. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/c++-sig/2007-October/012954.html
