The legacy of long-serving PlayStation studios Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games can be summed up by their respective contributions to the PS1 platforming scene, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon; both were beloved icons, but it was the former that had the ‘cool’ factor that elevated it to mascot status, while the latter contented itself to play second fiddle (and play it damn well, we might add).
But during the fourth generation of PlayStation, something changed. For the first time since the PlayStation’s inception, Naughty Dog ceded its status as Sony’s flagship development studio; with the unprecedented combined quantity and quality of Insomniac’s recent output, the creators of Spyro slowly began its push to take over the throne.
The shift of power arguably began in 2013, when Naughty Dog released the game that would be widely regarded as one of the best of all time. The Last of Us set a new gold standard in video game storytelling–a standard that the studio would be held to moving forward. But The Last of Us also began a negative fixation for Naughty Dog. The studio’s output of new games slowed from this point on, as they began to be drawn by the temptation of remasters (and eventually, remakes), rather than all-new games. When a Last of Us remaster was released on PS4 just a year after the original release, the taste of re-releasing a game would serve as a catalyst for the studio to remaster, remake, and re-release just as many old games than they made new ones.
During this time, Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy were a couple of the all-new releases, but both – especially the latter – lost something of what made that series special in the first place. Perhaps spurred on by the success of The Last of Us, they took on a notably darker tone than the original trilogy, doing away with the series’ playful supernatural elements and focusing instead on the relationships between their characters to create drama and tension.
While Naughty Dog was, like Uncharted’s heroes shimmying along a cliff edge, losing its footing, Insomniac was doing the exact opposite. Despite making their eighth-generation debut exclusively on the Xbox One with the cult classic Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac still came back to Playstation to deliver some platform classics. The Ratchet and Clank remake, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Spider-Man Miles Morales, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart were unanimously loved by the PlayStation audience, which is more than could be said for Naughty Dog’s PS4 games, with titles like Lost Legacy and The Last of Us: Part 2 proving divisive to say the least.
It’s hard to tell whether all fans will forgive The Last of Us Part 2 for that ending, while more recently the Uncharted collection struggled to find nearly the same size of audience as other PlayStation-PC games like God of War, Days Gone, and Horizon: Zero Dawn.
You’d think that after Naughty Dog remastered The Last of Us and made an extremely polarizing sequel, they’d perhaps move onto something new, but instead they went back to the well and announced The Last of Us Part 1, a complete remake of the first game. In the last ten years, Naughty Dog has delivered three versions of the same game, one controversial sequel, two derivative Uncharted sequels, and a PC re-release of Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy. Where is that unbounded creativity that saw them give us the Crash Trilogy, the Jak & Daxter trilogy, and the Uncharted trilogy? For perspective, Naughty Dog released seven original games in the decade preceding The Last of Us, and only three (including The Last of Us as well) in the decade since.
In that same ten years, Insomniac released one of the best games on the Xbox One (admittedly not a high bar, but that’s a discussion for another time), a remake of Ratchet & Clank (a game that, unlike The Last of Us Part 1, actually delivers on its ‘ground-up remake’ claims ), one of the best iterations of Spider-Man in recent memory, an equally amazing spinoff featuring Miles Morales, and an all-new entry in the Ratchet and Clank series.
Flanked by the likes of Guerilla Games, Santa Monica Studio, and Sucker Punch Productions, Insomniac has led the charge in maintaining PlayStation’s reputation for stellar single-player experiences in the early years of the PS5 and they also have a full-fledged Spider-Man sequel due out later this year as well as an all-new Wolverine game to look forward to.
As Naughty Dog has found itself in a creative decline, Insomniac has risen to the challenge time and time again setting the standard for a new generation.
