Former Naughty Dog artist says hand-made games could become future cathedrals
A former Naughty Dog visual effects artist says future audiences may look at today's big games the way visitors look at old cathedrals.
Matt Radford, who worked on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, made the remarks in an interview with the Kiwi Talkz podcast published on 13 October, Video Games Chronicle. He was discussing the sheer amount of hands-on work behind modern releases. A visual effects artist creates the light, smoke, debris and other moving detail that sells a scene.
Radford said a lot of new technology is changing how games are made. That shift, he said, will change how many people make games and in what roles. His worry is what that leaves behind.
He compared current production to historical architecture, naming Cologne Cathedral in Germany. People no longer build on that scale in that way, he argued, because faster and more efficient modern methods replaced older craft. The buildings survive as objects people marvel at.
The same could happen to games, he suggested. The work is painstaking.
Radford named three Naughty Dog titles he thinks could draw that kind of attention: Uncharted 4, The Last of Us Part 2 and the studio's next release, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Future viewers, he said, may marvel at the human acting, writing, modelling, sculpting and painting done by hand.
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is Naughty Dog's new science-fiction game from the creator of The Last of Us. The studio will not show more of the game until 2027, and has confirmed two more The Last of Us projects are in the works, Eurogamer.
Radford has also described his understanding of the studio's wider role as helping to sell Sony hardware, Yahoo. Naughty Dog is a PlayStation-owned studio, one of Sony's key teams for large story-led releases.
