GRTV: Former Naughty Dog Richard Lemarchand

Richard Lemarchand was the lead game designer on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, but left Naughty Dog to take up teaching at USC. We caught up with him at the Nordic Game conference to talk to him about the decision to leave Naughty Dog, the differences and similarities between indie development and AAA, as well as the state of the indie scene.

"The rate at which the indie game and the art game scene is exploding and evolving is almost too much to keep up with. However, I'm very lucky cause I'm one of the faculty of the GDC experimental gameplay worskshop. And so I got a chence to review a whole bunch of interesting indie and art games at the beginning of this year as we were screening games to show at GDC."

"I've always been of the opinion that one of the great things about indie culture and DIY culture of any kind, is that it's very democratising. It gives everyone a voice and so I've always been fascinated by the ebb and flow of the conversation between the mainstream of culture and all of the values embodied in something, whether it's a big blockbuster film or a big blockbuster game. And then all those multiplicity of voices that come from indie culture, especially in times like ours. You know, where the world is changing very rapidly, where the future is uncertain in a lot of cases. And I think where those two sets of voices meet is a very interesting boundary where we kind of thrash out a lot of the cultural issues that face us all."