I didn’t know that there was a documentary about the making of The Last of Us until I saw Naughty Dog’s trailer for its follow-up documentary, Grounded 2: Making The Last of Us Part 2. In fact, I only saw that trailer because I was🍃 checking o💫ut the new features in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, and came across it in the extras menu.
I watched the first Grounded last night, to contextualise the upcoming sequel. It’s a pretty typical making-of documentary. It interviews senior employees at Naughty Dog about the experience of creating the game, goes into how creative decisions are made, focuses on gameplay, acting, and sound, and overall makes director Neil Druckmann look very good. It touches briefly on crunch, but only to play it off as a necessary part of the business of game development – one member of staff goes so far as to say he loves crunch, and the laser focus that comes with it.
Later reports about Na𒆙ughty Dog management’s attitude towards crunch mꦛake this a particularly uncomfortable scene.
Naughty Dog, notoriously, crunches a lot, and brutally. Grounded explains this away by saying that the team only sees ‘glimmers’ of the game really coming together very late in the process, and everybody wants to get the game as good as possible when they finally see it starting to be fun. But in 2020, reportsꦯ came out that Naughty Dog’s working conditions are unsustainable, wi꧋th some crunching employees even ending up hospitalised. It’s well-known within the industry that the studio pushes staff, especially animators, to their breaking point, leading to a high rate of attrition and an imbalance between junior and senior animators, which then feeds more into crunch.
I was unimpressed at the way Grounded treated crunch. Crunch should not be normalised in the game development industry, and yet Naughty Dog doesn’t seem to care about its repercussions all that much, going so far as to frame it as a positive. In a 2021 interview with Game Informer, Druckmann and then-co-president Evan Wells dodged a question about crunch by saying they were hiring more management to give the team “more opportunities to provide feedback and check in on their well-being”, and soon after said that they “haven’t put a lot of thought&rdquo🍸; into unionisation and that they “don’t know if that would be a solution for crunch”. They insist that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to crunch, but don’t seem to realise that crunch culture comes from the top down. Saying working hard has gotten them far in their career is a clear sign that this back-breaking pace of work is expected of their employees.
Grounded 2 was started in 2016 and abandoned when the pandemic started🐼 in 2020. This documentary, made up of the footage that does exist, shows at least one staff member talking about being burned out, saying they “can’t crunch like they used to”. This suggests that this peek behind the opaque curtain of game development might finally be honest about the extent of its crunch culture and open secret of the repercussions it’s had on the company.
Do I believe that it’s goin💟g to꧋ be a perfectly honest, candid exploration of crunch culture? No. I don’t think Naughty Dog will showcase a documentary that makes it look bad, especially because I don’t think Sony would be too pleased about one of its star studios coming out and admitting its working environment is absolutely battering its staff. But there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case until we see it, and I’m (probably naively) hoping for the best.
PS𓂃🔴A: Play The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered On Hard Difficulty
Don't be afraid to challenge yourself w♈hen Naughty Dog's masterpiece comes to PS5.