“The developer team was on what felt like a death march – Naughty Dog prides itself on not using producers or production managers,” they continued, “so there were constantly things being added or changed but no one was watching how this will affect the schedule or the developers’ workloads.”
“It was an attitude of ‘Do what you have to do to get this change in,’” they added. “Naughty Dog has moved the launch date of games before, but that usually just means that crunch lasts several more months. Moving the launch date never alleviated the crunch.”
“Crunching felt mandatory to your job security,” they also said.
“During crunch time, which lasted many months, we could be working anywhere from 60 to 80 hour weeks on average,” they added. “I remember hitting 100 plus hours the final week of development on The Last of Us.”