Sony's Interview with Neil Druckmann Sparks Controversy

TapTechNews May 30 - Sony released an article last week promoting its long-term "creative entertainment vision", including interviews with key employees. Neil Druckmann, the director of Naughty Dog Studio (which developed The Last of Us and Uncharted series), was also interviewed, but this interview has sparked controversy in the gaming industry.

Based on the interview content released by Sony, Druckmann said that artificial intelligence can "create nuanced conversations and characters", and hinted that the new game being developed by Naughty Dog (not officially announced yet) "will redefine the mainstream gaming perception". These remarks seem rather exaggerated and controversial for a studio director who is highly beloved by fans.

The problem is that Druckmann was "severely misconstrued" by his employer. TapTechNews noted that a few days after Sony released the interview, Druckmann said on social media "this is not what I said". Later, he also expressed dissatisfaction by posting part of the original interview (Engadget said Druckmann's wording was rather polite, after all, no one would easily offend their breadwinner).

Game journalist Stephen Totilo also shared the comparison between Druckmann's original words and the content released by Sony, and bolded the words that Druckmann never said but appeared in Sony's interview. The results showed that Sony virtually fabricated most of the content out of thin air, which undoubtedly aroused the anger of players.

Five days after the incident, Sony finally responded by removing this interview from its official website. And they didn't simply delete the page, but replaced it with an apology statement, apologizing "for any negative impact on Neil and the Naughty Dog team".

In a paragraph of the apology statement: "Upon re-examining our recent interview with Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, we found some significant errors and inaccuracies that do not represent his views and values (including topics such as animation, writing, technology, artificial intelligence, and future projects)." In other words, most of the content mentioned by Druckmann in the interview was tampered with by Sony.