Biography provided by Chris Kohler, Editorial Director of Digital Eclipse, a game developer devoted to preserving the history of video games.
When the co-founders of the game studio Naughty Dog, then best known for Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, decided to plan their exit from the company, one of the employees they looked to as a successor was a game designer who had joined only a few years before: Evan Wells.
Shortly after Naughty Dog's acquisition by Sony and the subsequent release of Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy in 2001, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, who had run the studio since they established it in 1984, approached Wells and another Naughty Dog employee with the news.
“I thought… oh my God. I mean, I am totally not prepared for this. I have zero qualifications to do this. But I can't say no," Wells said of that moment.
Gavin and Rubin's decision to approach Wells would ultimately prove correct. Three years later, the pair stepped down and handed control of Naughty Dog to Evan Wells and programmer Stephen White. The two led the studio during an important transitional year until White departed to live in Seattle. Wells managed the studio as president for a year, with programmer Christophe Balestra presiding as his vice president. Wells would then name Balestra his co-president until the latter’s retirement in 2017. Under their leadership, they would steer Naughty Dog's evolution from a maker of cartoon action games into the studio behind the character-driven, groundbreaking series Uncharted and The Last of Us.
"Evan took over one of the most successful classical-era PlayStation developers and helped utterly redefine that developer into the more mature, storytelling pinnacle of development it is today," says Jason Rubin. "Were it not for his leadership, the industry might not have evolved in the same way."
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Evan Wells had no shortage of opportunities to play video games. "My dad brought home an Atari 2600 when I was probably five years old. On weekends, my mom would follow me around the arcade, feeding me tokens and quarters," he says. "They encouraged my passion – or maybe fed my addiction."
Still, a career in games was not something Wells ever anticipated. In fact, he wasn't quite sure what he was going to do. "I wanted to study physics, or maybe I thought I'd go into law. In college, I didn't declare my major until I was a sophomore, and I decided I'd do computer science," he says. Meanwhile, he and his Stanford University roommate would visit the local Blockbuster Video several times a week, renting their way through the store's entire library of console games.
"We stayed up all night playing ToeJam & Earl," he says. "Finally, the credits roll, and the first name on the list was Mark Voorsanger. And I was like, Voorsanger – that's not that common a name. I know a Conrad Voorsanger." It turned out that one of Wells's teammates on the Stanford gymnastics team was, in fact, the brother of ToeJam & Earl's programmer. Soon after, Evan Wells was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to the small office of Johnson Voorsanger Productions for a job interview.
"I was fanboying on all the games that they had worked on," Wells said. "And I guess that was enough for them to take a chance on a completely unqualified sophomore in college to do level design." Wells' deep dive into the library of games at his Blockbuster started paying dividends, as he used his broad knowledge of platformer games to begin designing side-scrolling levels for the next ToeJam & Earl game, Panic on Funkotron, during his summer break.
Johnson Voorsanger Productions' office happened to be located next to developer Toys for Bob, which was creating a game called The Horde for the publisher Crystal Dynamics. And as luck would have it, Crystal Dynamics happened to be located across the street from Stanford. One thing led to another, and Wells found himself spending his next summer break designing levels for Crystal Dynamics' next big platform game, Gex.
"It quickly became apparent that we were not going to be done at the end of summer," Wells recalls. "And it got delayed, delayed, delayed." Gex did not ship until April, which meant that Wells kept working at Crystal Dynamics long into the school year. "I was hooked. I mean, I loved it. I was there all day and all night soaking it all in," Wells said. "I barely graduated, but it was enough to get by. Cs get degrees!"
Now full time at Crystal Dynamics, Wells was made the lead designer on the sequel to Gex. While it was originally conceived as another 2D platformer, the arrivals of Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot necessitated a shift in dimensions. 1998's Gex: Enter the Gecko brought the series into 3D, won critical acclaim for its level designs, and was nominated for Console Action Game of the Year at the inaugural Interactive Achievement Awards (now the D.I.C.E. Awards).
The next challenge that Wells wanted to tackle was a mascot racing game. While he and programmer Daniel Chan were making headway on a racer starring Gex at Crystal Dynamics, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin at Naughty Dog were trying to hire the pair of them away to create a similar game at Naughty Dog.
"My home was the Bay Area, and I didn't think LA was for me," Wells said. "So I turned down the first couple of offers." But eventually, Wells and Chan came to the conclusion that they would have a better chance of success with a Crash Bandicoot racer, and left Crystal Dynamics to join Naughty Dog.
“Within a year, Evan was already a senior person on any project we were working on,” Jason Rubin recalled in a 2013 interview. “Basically second to me, in terms of directing stuff, rather than programming. But immediately, the talent was obviously there.”
After serving as the lead designer for Crash Team Racing and Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Wells now found that Naughty Dog wanted to move away from the character he'd moved to Los Angeles for. "Universal owned the Crash IP, and Jason wanted to make a game with Sony that Sony controlled," Wells said.
Taking inspiration not only from 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie but from "the art direction of Final Fantasy and other games that were coming out of Japan," Naughty Dog's next big project was Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a PlayStation 2 exclusive that showed off the power of the new machine with a gorgeous world, cinematic scenes, and an open, interconnected world.
"Our ambitions were pretty high," Wells said. "We wanted to make an environment that if you see it, you could go to it. If there was a building, you could walk inside it. We wanted to build a world, and not discrete levels like we had been doing."
Jak & Daxter proved to be a killer app for the then-new PlayStation 2 hardware, but as work began on a sequel, Naughty Dog began to notice that the gaming world was going through more than just technological changes.
"PlayStation really moved video games out of a pursuit for young kids and teenagers to something that adults of any age could enjoy," Wells said. For Jak II, released in 2003, Naughty Dog's inspiration was less Banjo and more Grand Theft Auto. The characters found themselves in a dystopian world, the gameplay was dominated by third-person shooting, and the cinematic presentation was even more polished. Amongst its many Interactive Achievement Award nominations, Jak II was a finalist in the then-new "Outstanding Achievement in Character Performance" category.
While Naughty Dog was enjoying critical and financial success with the Jak series, the company was at an inflection point as its co-founders were winding down their time at the studio. "Naughty Dog was not an easy company to run," says Jason Rubin. "I used to joke that the extremely high standards and speed at which we made things happen required a truly insane leader, which I guess I was. Evan was that, but on a more even keel, which I think was necessary for the longer development cycles and change in development depth that the later PlayStations brought." By the end of the development of Jak 3, Rubin was still with Naughty Dog, but Wells, now ensconced in Rubin's old office, was "calling the shots."
"We were trying to fill some very big shoes, and we were in the shadow of some gaming giants and pioneers who had the instant respect of the whole studio," Wells says. "So many times people would come and say, 'Well, that's not how Jason would have done it.' And I'm like, 'I'm not Jason. I can't do it like Jason. I'm going to do it like me.'"
Soon, Wells found himself facing a critical decision. Naughty Dog was working on two games: a Jak & Daxter game for the portable PSP system, and an all-new game, codenamed “Big,” for the upcoming PlayStation 3 hardware.
"We were seduced by the power of the PlayStation 3, thinking we can do things completely differently than we were doing on Jak & Daxter," Wells said. "The artists will model these super detailed levels and the tools would make it all work. It was this pipe dream that never came together, and the team was getting super frustrated because they couldn't work. The tools wouldn't build levels, they couldn't build characters."
"This was one of the darkest times," he said. "I was seriously afraid that Jason and Andy had handed me this studio on a silver platter, making the best games in the world, and it's going to collapse under my watch." So Wells made the call to stop development on the PSP game and move that team and its leader Christophe Balestra over to Project Big. "He spent three months digging in there, and he saved us," Wells said. Balestra would become Wells' co-president until his 2017 retirement.
Project Big, a realistic, cinematic shooter with blockbuster production values and a cast of vivid human characters would be unveiled at the 2006 E3 Expo – at first, without a title, but it would soon be known as Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, directed by Amy Hennig.
2009's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, co-directed by Bruce Straley and Hennig, was Naughty Dog's opportunity to continue to raise the stakes. In Wells' telling, the team wanted to take the handful of the most impactful, blockbuster moments of the first Uncharted and construct an entire game out of those impressive set pieces. At that year's D.I.C.E. Awards, Uncharted 2 racked up 15 nominations – a record that still stands today.
Of those 15 nominations, it took home 10 awards including Game of the Year – a record that it today shares with another Naughty Dog game, The Last of Us.
That project got its start when Uncharted 2's Straley and co-designer Neil Druckmann wanted to break away from the Uncharted team and lead their own game. The Last of Us, the story of Joel and Ellie’s cross-country trek in a world ravaged by a viral outbreak, continued the evolution of Naughty Dog's unique approach, breaking new ground in cinematic storytelling and characterization.
Both Uncharted and The Last of Us have grown beyond the world of gaming to great success. Sony’s Uncharted film adaptation starring Tom Holland grossed over $400 million worldwide. Meanwhile, The Last of Us has been transformed into a record-breaking and award-winning HBO television series co-created by Druckmann.
In 2020, following the release of the similarly acclaimed The Last of Us Part II, Druckmann became co-president of the company as Wells began to plot his own exit, hoping for a similar smooth and gradual transition. Wells semi-retired in 2023 – technically. "I'm still there," he says. "I’m still helping out, as long as they want me around." Having been relieved of the burden of keeping the studio running – Naughty Dog is now run by a multidisciplinary leadership team – he can continue to contribute to the studio's ongoing success.
"We just celebrated our 40th anniversary, and I struggle to even think of any other game studio that has that kind of history," Wells says. "I think to this day, it's always been our motivation to advance the state of the art and what people could expect from a video game. And that comes right from Jason and Andy, from the earliest days."
Outside of his dedicated work to the games industry, Wells is an active donor and supporter in a number of fields, including transgender rights and men’s gymnastics. He additionally serves as CEO of The Eames Chuchen Foundation, which provides scholarships for math students, music students, and swimmers.
For his considerable contributions to advancing the state of the art in games, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences is honored to present Evan Wells with its Hall of Fame Award at this year's D.I.C.E. Summit.