Nobody had ever done that before.
Not with someone sitting next to him reading the screen out. On his own, start to finish, a twenty-five hour game. Naughty Dog had spent three years making that possible, and almost nobody who played it ever noticed.
Brandon Cole is a blind gamer. Naughty Dog brought him in as a consultant on Part II and he stayed on it for three years, in and out of the studio, going through every menu, every fight, every ledge, working out what a person who cannot see the screen would need to hear instead.
He has written about being frightened, the whole way through, that they were going to give up on it.
I was THAT terrified at first. That they'd say: nope, all this is too much. Can't do it. Done.Brandon Cole, accessibility consultant
But after a while, I started to see that they really, really did want to do this. I saw that I had already won.Brandon Cole
And the line I keep coming back to, about walking into the building on the first day:
I felt welcomed. I felt like I belonged there.Brandon Cole
Steve Saylor, another blind gamer who consulted on it, filmed himself launching the game for the first time. The text-to-speech begins reading the accessibility options aloud, one after another after another, and he sits there and cries. CNN ran it. So did the BBC. He said afterwards that accessible gaming now has a before and an after.
Naughty Dog say the game shipped with more than sixty accessibility settings. Here is every one they named when they announced it, grouped the way they grouped them. Tap a group to pull it out.
Read it slowly, because the interesting part is not the total. It is that every single one of them is a specific person somebody sat and imagined.
Repeated Button Presses is for someone who cannot mash a button. Infinite Breath is for someone who cannot hold one down while under water. Skip Puzzle Option is for someone who wants the story and cannot do the puzzle. Traversal Assistance gets you across a gap you cannot judge. Guitar Vibration Cues let a deaf player feel a song they will never hear.
And Hostages Don't Escape, which is there so a slower player does not lose the person they were trying to save.
No law made them do this and no publisher demanded it. It went into a game that was going to sell tens of millions of copies without a single one of these settings, and the overwhelming majority of people who bought it never opened that menu once. They built it anyway, for the comparatively small number of people who could not play otherwise, and then they published the entire list so that other studios could copy it.
Vision, hearing and motor. One button each, so that a blind player does not have to find and set eighty things individually before they can start. Somebody thought about the first ninety seconds.
Naughty Dog's public figure is "more than sixty". Counting every setting they listed by name comes out higher, because a few are options nested inside others. Either way it was the most any game of this size had ever shipped with.
They spent three years so that a few thousand people could finish a game. Then they told everyone how.
Every setting on this page is taken from Naughty Dog's own announcement on the PlayStation Blog in June 2020, and the grouping into vision, hearing, motor, combat and difficulty is theirs rather than mine. I have not added anything, and I am not judging how well any of it works in practice, only what they built. Their headline figure is "more than sixty settings"; listing everything they named individually comes to eighty, because a few are sub-options.
Brandon Cole's quotes are from his own written account at brandoncole.net. Steve Saylor's reaction was covered by CNN and BBC News in June 2020. Both are blind gamers who worked as consultants on the game. Other blind players, including Amadeus Lane, also completed it unaided.
Screenshots are Sony and Naughty Dog's own press assets. Not affiliated with Naughty Dog, Sony or PlayStation.
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