Grant Hoechst Jackson, A.B. '18: Leading the design team at Naughty Dog gaming company

As Grant Hoechst Jackson, A.B. ‘18, was working as a teaching fellow (TF) in a summer computer science class at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), he realized he kept using video games as examples. He’d been playing video games for as long as he could remember, but for a long time they were just entertainment. But the more he delved into the computer science (CS) underlying them, the more he realized he didn’t want to just play games – he wanted to make them.

“I started to research a little bit more of what game development and design really looks like – how do these things not just spring into existence, but become real works compiled by real developers, said Jackson.

In his third year at Harvard, Jackson found an internship at the game company Activision Blizzard through Harvard’s Office for Career Services. He met with recruiters in the basement of Pforzheimer House and they talked about what he did and didn’t like with a recent Activision game.

“We started drawing maps, we talked at length about it, and I thought, ‘This rules,’” he said. “Everything was different from being a hardcore software engineer, and I knew this was more where my enthusiasm lay.”

After graduating, he became a full-time game designer at Naughty Dog, a games studio responsible for acclaimed franchises such as “The Last of Us” and “Uncharted.” Jackson is in his eighth year at the company and is now a lead game designer for an upcoming action-adventure game called “Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.”

“As a game designer, it's a combination of effort between heads-down time working on something, and then a lot of going over to someone's desk and figuring something out together through collaborative management,” Jackson said. “A lot of my responsibility is about the project itself, attention to detail and making sure that vision is being communicated, things are cohesive, feedback is being given in the right ways, and pace is being hit on deadlines. But it’s also a people management role where I have my slice of the team of designers who I'm responsible for, and making sure they have the resources and clear communication they need.”

Growing up in northern Virginia, Jackson studied the piano and percussion instruments such as the marimba, and when his hands weren’t on an instrument, they were on a computer keyboard or gaming controller. His parents didn’t see games as a distraction, but rather an activity that the family could bond around just like any other form of entertainment.

“Growing up, my younger sister and I played a ton of games because my folks were encouraging and took them seriously,” he said. “I was very lucky that one of my longest running piano teachers would let me alternate between a piece from the classical repertoire and then a piece from my favorite game or film.”

When it came time to pick a university, Jackson wasn’t sure what he wanted to study. He’d had limited exposure to computer science, and while he planned to play music in college, he wasn’t sure that was the best choice for a concentration.

Harvard’s educational approach seemed the most welcoming for someone so undecided.

“The school offered not just excellence in a bunch of different areas, but the encouragement to expose yourself to those different areas and become a well-rounded liberal arts student,” he said. “There was a roundedness to the experience that I really liked, plus I just liked Cambridge.”

Jackson took a wide range of introductory classes at Harvard, but it was the twin computer science classes of “CS50: Introduction to Computer Science” and “CS51: Abstraction and Design in Computation” that convinced him to pick CS as a concentration. He went on to be a TF for both courses.

“There's a lot of similarity between programming languages I learned at SEAS and some of the stuff that we do in our language here,” he said. “There’s a flexibility of thinking that some of those classes imbued in me that served me very well. A lot of my courses weren't programming courses. Professors would hand out an assignment, but we could choose the programming language. Naughty Dog kind of requires a person that can just figure out how stuff works and can cobble together for themselves an understanding of the programming language. There for sure were aspects of problem-solving computer science at SEAS that translated pretty naturally to doing my early days of scripting here.”

Since joining Naughty Dog, Jackson has designed numerous different elements essential to games. He’s designed combat systems, scripted level progression and checkpoints, developed weather patterns and effects, even simple wear and tear elements such as ripped clothing or blood splotches on skin. His efforts helped turn “The Last of Us: Part II” into a game that won numerous Game of the Year awards and has been adapted into the current seasons of an Emmy-nominated show on HBO.

“Every step along the way there were challenges, things that weren't perfect that took time to get perfect,” he said. “But partly because I held the first game so near and dear to my heart, partly because I believed in the story and experience we were trying to deliver in the second game, and partly because I was lured by the talent of everyone around me on the team, I did enjoy a fair amount of confidence that this game would be resonant with a pretty large group of people.”

Jackson also continues to work as film composer, having never lost his passion for music. His advice for current Harvard students curious about game design: “Drink deeply both from things within the Harvard curriculum and from things outside and around it.”

“Most of my ‘formal’ game dev education came from playing as many different things as I could,” he said. “There's a mindset shift that happens with any creative field where you consume something less as purely an audience who wants to have fun or escape or delve into a dramatic story, and more as a creator and with a creator's eye. It takes self-motivated curiosity to delve into the possibilities, so follow that curiosity.”