Godfather of Gaming: How a Palisadian conquered video gaming with a naughty dog, a crazy marsupial, a hybrid otter and a treasure hunter

By John Harlow | Editor-in-Chief

Over the next few weeks Andy Gavin, a Palisadian video game designer whose titles have earned more than $1 billion over the past two decades, will announce details of his next grand adventure.

The slightly bonkers genius behind the Naughty Dog studio, which has spawned past gaming phenomenon such as “Crash Bandicoot” and this year’s top-selling “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End,” is a little mysterious about his plans.

This is a Palisadian who is regarded as an outspoken guru of games, whose presence at Silicon Valley seminars moves the tickets at a premium, whose fans send him boxes of obsolete games to sign so they can make their own little fortunes in eBay.

But his next step? It could be anything.

Gavin has, after all, been a rocket scientist as well as probed the limits of artificial intelligence. (That has convinced him the  “Singularity” will one day happen, where man and machine merge, although probably not as early as 2040 as futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts.)

He has written critically acclaimed novels that merge modern history and science fiction in a style that critics compared with Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson in ambition and scope.

There is a hint about future plans in his food and wine blog, all-things-andy-gavin.com, an omnivore’s delight from strip mall Asian eateries untasted even by Jonathan Gold to grand dishes in Italy and Spain. This Palisadian has been eating his way around the world. It’s going to be gastronomic.

All he will reveal sipping boba, striving to make himself heard over the teenage din of Palisades Garden Café in the Village, is that he is looking at a restaurant project with some powerful partners.

And it will fuse something new and old into something very different.

“You will have to wait and see,” he teased because, as all his friends admit, he can be very frustrating like that. Making us wait for lunch indeed. Could be the next big dining thing.

It’s a creative process similar to his early ventures, games that often started out looking like an old favorite but during the coding process morphed into something bolder and more colorful that won every top prize in the gaming business.

And made the Virginia-born artist and entrepreneur a wealthy man, an independent thinker who is willing to both praise and pour scorn on the business that uplifted him.

Video gaming is the South America of popular culture­—unless its Rio, few people outside the world know much about it. It rarely throws up celebrities.

And, three decades ago, when kid Gavin started coding for fun, arcade and early computer games seemed a bit lightweight. There was no there there, no social resonance like some pop music or charismatic cool like the movie business.

They stopped being kid’s stuff a long time ago.

In 2016 the video game business will earn approaching $100 billion, twice as much as the international film business. A 150 million Americans play games more than three hours per week, on consuls, phones and tablets, with an average age of 35. Not kids’ stuff.

When Gavin started coding in the early 1980s as that smart kid for whom all math is basic, it was all still a novelty.

Always a talker, he persuaded his dad to buy an early Apple II computer “for the family accounts”

“But that never happened. My dad stuck with paper and I started writing the games I wanted to play onto tape drives. First it was about a wizard casting spells because that was what I was into—that and The Beatles and 1970s prog rock,” Gavin, 46, recalled last week.

“Still love that sound.”

Gavin’s own wizard moment happened in Hebrew school when he bumped into another 12-year-old geek—Jason Rubin, who would be his partner and co-creator for the next two decades.

They complemented each other, like Lennon and McCartney, or more accurately the Woz and Steve Jobs at early Apple.

“I could code and he could make things look good—we worked well together.”

The juveniles created their first games—adventures called “Punch Out” and the educational “Math Jam”—in weekend binges and, even more impressively, sold them to a small distributor.

Their first big game, “Ski Crazed,” sold 3,000 copies and earned them maybe $4,000.

This was teenage living.

Such fun times ended when Gavin took his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was also carrying out research for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—yes, he was a rocket scientist “but at that time it was less interesting than it sounds, or today.”

But his MIT background, manipulating the computer language LISP, encouraged Gavin and Rubin to develop their own own coding style—and a unique approach to gaming.

“I wanted to make games that felt crazy like old Warner Bros. cartoons, like you saw in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ but hooked you into the story—make you care about the characters”.

By 1984, when Gavin and Rubin founded their own company, Naughty Dog (yes, there was an errant hound chewing on the furniture), their graphics were already pushing way ahead of their rivals.

During these “indie rock” years there were a series of ever-bigger games today only fondly remembered by the cognoscenti—“Dream Zone,” “Keef the Thief,” “Way of the Warrior.” Naughty Dog started selling out the stadiums, metaphorically speaking, in 1994 with a crazy cartoon chase, very Roger Rabbit, with an Australian marsupial as hero: Crash Bandicoot.

This Sonic the Hedgehog-style wackiness helped launch the Sony PlayStation, spawned 17 sequels on various platforms—“the second nearly killed me. I did not leave the office for a year. I forgot how to shop for milk,” recalled Gavin wearily—and sold more than 50 million copies.

He created the villain, Dr. Neo Cortex, with a kind of British villain accent—but apart from that, critics said, it was flawless fun.

The cheery marsupial is set to return again in October, as a guest star in the platform game “Skylanders: Imaginators.” The graphics have been upgraded again although, contrary to rumors, thankfully not photorealistic enough to appreciate the large rat’s rare gift to female bandicoots—a bifurcated penis. There are limits, even in video games.

This was followed by an even sillier game, “Jak and Daxter,” two more colorful characters saving the world from darkness by leaping over stuff: It went global fast.

And then came “Uncharted,” a Lara Croft–style adventure with a male hero, treasure hunter Nathan Drake, whose reign has only come to an end with a concluding chapter this year—allegedly.

By this time Gavin and Rubin had sold their canine interests to Sony and gone their separate ways: Rubin is now at Oculus, the virtual reality headset people, one possible future direction for video games says Gavin.

“But they have not yet cracked the space problem. You walk around with this helmet in, seeing amazing stuff as if you are in an alternative 3-D nearly photorealistic world. But back in this world you are tied to helmet cables and bumping into things. Or sitting in a chair, which has limits too,” said Gavin. “They need to sort that out.”

Another gaming route, he feels, is augmented reality – where, as in the latest “Pokémon Go” sensation, you are looking through a device like an iPhone and projecting a game onto the real world.

“Pokémon’s success lay more in the brand than the AR technology.

“Niantic, the people who made it, published a very similar game (called Ingress) which did not sell because it did not have the Pokémon beasts.

“And today there are so many hundreds of thousands of mobile games released, because of the relatively low cost of entry to the market. But a strategy to get noticed on the Apple app store, like a Pokémon, is more critical than the technology running the game.”

He is also irritated by the bait and switch of many mobile games. They cost around $200,000 to make, and free to download. But then the fees pile up when you want to play, the “in app purchase.”

“The most insidious trend is paying extra to play better, with bigger guns or whatever, which is unfair to those who just want to have fun. People will see through that strategy, eventually.”

At the other end are the blockbuster console games, which he still loves because as he says they “put fun first.” His current favorites include “Dark Souls III,” “The Witcher 3” and, of course, the fourth and final “Uncharted.” He still had, he admits, a thing for games involving pirates.

He frets about the escalating costs of producing such games.

For instance, “Destiny,” a sci-fi shooting game, took five years and cost $500 million to code and market, which matches Hollywood’s most expensive movie (“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” with a budget of $378.5 million).

He fears that will make game shops as narratively risk adverse and dependent on sequels as Hollywood: “There is no room for the middle-budgeted video game, however innovative. And a big flop depresses the entre industry.”
He also thinks there is a lot of voodoo bragging about, tech not as innovative as its claimed. “That new game ‘No Man’s Sky,’ where you can visit quintillions of different planets? It’s like those Palisadian yogurt shops who can offer many flavors but are based on mixing basic ingredients together. It’s great yogurt, I love it, but it’s based on 30 basic flavors.”

Please don’t tell us any more how the sausage is made.

Andy Gavin and his family moved to the Palisades in the late 1990s, first living on the coast and then moving to higher ground where he used to throw massive July 4 parties.

He stopped those when literally hundreds of people turned up. Naughty dogs, in spirit, all.

Since exiting Naughty Dog he has sold another start-up to Fox, written some smaller-scale games and of course published his first two novels—“The Darkening Dream” and “Untimed,” both greeted by fans as great reads.

They have also turned him into a history buff, devouring accounts of the Victorian steam age and first World War that underpin his writing.

A third volume was put on hold this year to work on his big food idea.

Andy Gavin is in the enviable position of being able to speak freely, a true Pali Noisemaker, and only invest financially and emotionally in projects that move him.

He can eat anywhere. He does love the Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley, although the Village’s own Pearl Dragon does hold a space in his heart.

So where he chooses to eat, or what game he produces next, or what book he writes—these are his choices. Which makes whatever happens next potentially as wild as any bifurcated bandicoot.