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With Naughty Dog, you often get more than you asked for. When the Sony-affiliated Santa Monica developer set about creating a light-hearted jaunt for the PlayStation 3 with Uncharted, it created a dynamic and impressively filmic brand of interactive action. As the last generation came to an end and it set about a fusion of the survival horror of Resident Evil 4 with the emotional heart of Ico, it flourished a post apocalyptic genre piece with a tale of human warmth: a story about adolescence interrupted, adulthood and parental responsibility, as well as the countless lies we tell each other every day just in order to survive.So it's no surprise that a one-on-one interview with The Last of Us' game director blossoms into something else. When Bruce Straley strolls into the Sony lobby he's flanked by both his cohort, creative director Neil Druckmann, and Naughty Dog's co-president Evan Wells. The three are together in London ahead of this year's BAFTA awards, at which The Last of Us would go on to win five awards, including the top honour of best game. It's one of many remarkable achievements in what's been an incredible year for the game, culminating in the release of the Remastered PS4 version this week.
You suspect that to have been awarded in the same forum that has honoured the likes of Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Powell and Pressburger in the past must have had a special resonance for Naughty Dog. The story of the developer since the turn of the century has been of it reaching for a new blend of cinema and games, where human stories told with Hollywood production values propel players' interactions with lush digital worlds.
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