The Creative Head of Naughty Dog Claims to Have Never Planned For Sequels

Neil Druckmann, the president and person behind Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, has said at DICE Summit that the studio never plans for sequels. According to him, he doesn’t have the bandwidth to think about sequels as the game in front of them is already taking most of his time.

“I think you’re jinxing yourself if you’re starting to think about the sequel when you’re working on the first game,” he said in the interview. He continued by talking about the development of The Last of Us 2 and how every once in a while, he’d get an idea for a sequel. “But I just approach it as, ‘what if I never get to do another one?’…I’m not saving some idea for the future. If there’s a cool idea, I’m doing my best to get it into here”.

He also mentioned that when they were making the very first Uncharted game, he had no idea that they would do the iconic train sequence of Uncharted 2. It was all figured out when they were already creating the sequel. He concisely tied up the interview by saying that making a sequel requires a level of confidence that he doesn’t have. “Like this is going to be so successful, I know where this is going next. I’m like, I just want to focus on the next five days in front of me, let alone 10 years down the line”.

Naughty Dog is currently developing Intergalactic, a project that the studio has been working on since 2020. According to the blog post uploaded regarding the announcement, it’s going to be the studio’s wildest and most creative story yet. There’s not much known about the game aside from it being developed for the PlayStation 5.