Some video game remakes are celebrated as the natural result of technological progress, while others immediately spark debate. The Last of Us: Part I, which launched on PS5 in 2022, was widely seen as a brilliant 1:1 modernization of one of the greatest games ever made. But in the middle of all that praise, it is easy to forget the people who built the original in the first place, and they have their own thoughts about what Naughty Dog did with the remake. Not everyone is happy with the studio’s decisions.
Benson Russell spent eight years at Naughty Dog as a senior combat designer until leaving the studio in 2015, and in the Kiwi Talkz podcast he spoke with unusual candor about what it felt like to watch the PlayStation team remake every single combat encounter he had created. In comments also cited by GamesRadar, he said it was literally like taking his scripts, hitting delete, and putting in new ones.
A Former Naughty Dog Developer Is Angry With the Studio
According to Russell, this is not simply a case of the game being rebuilt with better technology. He explained that every little detail in the original encounters mattered: he placed the enemy spawns, he named them, and he wrote the scripts that made combat function exactly the way it was supposed to. In his view, that represented a brutal amount of work, and when The Last of Us: Part I arrived with every combat encounter redone, it hit him hard.
His anger does not come only from professional pride. Russell argues that the way Naughty Dog positioned the remake in the market creates the impression that the original work is some outdated thing that can now be pushed aside, when in reality it was the foundation that made the later version possible at all. In his eyes, the messaging around the remake suggests that this new release is the only truly valid way to experience the game, and that is a deeply insulting message for the people who built the first version from the ground up.
The Remake May Be the Best Way to Play It, but the Original Work Still Matters
Russell is not denying that the remake may be the best way for many players to experience The Last of Us today, but he believes the original creators’ work should still be valued. In the podcast, he said there are few things more insulting than telling the people who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into something that it is now going to be recreated. By presenting the remake as the definitive experience, he believes the studio is effectively saying: your work only led to this, but it is no longer what matters.
He put it even more bluntly when he said he does not care if the remake team was inspired by the combat he created, because the end result is still the same: they erased his work. At that point, the argument stops being only about technical changes and becomes something larger, namely how the games industry treats its own history and how willing it really is to value the people who laid the groundwork in the first place.
Source: 3DJuegos
