Naughty Dog co-developing new project in “beloved franchise”

Uncharted and The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog is working with a number of other PlayStation Studios teams to develop a mysterious new project in a “beloved franchise”.

That’s according to a newly spotted Sony job listing (thanks VGC) seeking a game design intern to work at a “new PlayStation studio based in San Diego… co-developing an exciting new project with Naughty Dog in a beloved franchise.” There’s no additional information about the new studio, but it seems highly likely it’s the same San-Diego-based “new internal game develop team” Sony referenced in a different job listing earlier this week.

That earlier job advert initially revealed the new team was being built to collaborate on a new “high visibility” project with Naughty Dog and Visual Arts – Sony’s San-Diego-based support studio that most recently worked with Naughty Dog on its The Last of Us: Part 1 remake. However, a later edit removed the explicit reference to Visual Arts, for reasons unknown.

As to what this mysterious new Naughty Dog collaboration might be, that remains unclear, but there’ve been signs over last year hinting at a possible Uncharted revival. Both Visual Arts and Days Gone developer Bend Studio were linked to new Uncharted projects in a Bloomberg article published in 2021 – although neither title was in active development – and a Naughty Dog recruiter raised eyebrows back in April when they said they were hiring talent to build teams for new titles and “the legacy of Uncharted”.

Of course, there’s another Naughty Dog series set to be thrust back into the spotlight in the presumably not-too-distant future; Ruben Fleischer, the director of Sony’s live-action Uncharted movie, revealed he was adapting Jak and Daxter for the big screen earlier this year – and it’s not too outlandish to believe Sony might want a new game to accompany that. Or maybe now that two months have passed, it’s eyeing up a Last of Us remake remake – who knows?

Whatever the mysterious new Naughty Dog collaboration ultimately proves to be, it’s clear from the recent flurry of ads that things are beginning to step up a gear behind-the-scenes. Hopefully it won’t be too long before more is revealed.