French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Christophe Balestra, co-president of Naughty Dog, has just joined the association as an honorary member. He will also participate in the Support Committee for the National Video Games Museum.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
As a teenager, Christophe Balestra discovered computing with an Atari 520 ST, but he quickly grew tired of games and took up programming, notably through a friend who introduced him to the world of demomakers. A zealous student, Christophe trained in Assembler, learned to program quickly for coding parties and to collaborate with graphic designers and musicians. He obtained a DUT in Computer Science in Montreuil to reassure his father and founded Rayland Interactive, a studio whose premises are located in his apartment. He developed some small games there like Mad Trax or BANG! Gunship Elite. The adventure ended in the early 2000s when the creation of video games became difficult in France. He was then offered the chance to have his own team in England, but he didn't like the experience and left, preferring to apply for Naughty Dog. He was recruited immediately as the studio began work on Jak II: Hors la loi. He moved with his family to the United States, and became co-president of the company after only three years, following the departure of founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin in 2004 and 2005. After two other episodes of Jak, which confirmed the technical skills of the team, the latter tackled the Uncharted trilogy which quickly established itself as the new benchmark for what is possible to do on PlayStation 3 in terms of action big show. After the second episode, the studio splits into two teams in order to start work on another project. If a new episode of Jak is considered initially, it will ultimately be the ambitious The Last Of Us, the console's true swan song and one of the best sellers of 2013, an impressive success for an exclusivity and a new franchise.
Mad Trax (Windows, 1998)
Jak II: Outlaw (PlayStation 2, 2003)
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PlayStation 3, 2007)
The Last of Us (PlayStation 3, 2013)
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