Fortune Telling: Naughty Dog’s Amy Hennig discusses Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
By Steven Hopper

“The power of the PS3 hardware really opened up new possibilities to create a realistic world and believable human characters, so we wanted to explore that.”

With games like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter under its belt, developer Naughty Dog is certainly no stranger to the action-platforming genre. The team has been responsible for some of the best exclusive titles to land on Sony’s platforms, and now they are gearing up to create a brand new franchise with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, exclusively for the PlayStation 3.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune combines the platforming elements that Naughty Dog has honed over the years with some fun gunplay and an interesting and engaging pulp adventure story. While the game’s Naughty Dog’s Amy Hennig (Game Director on Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune) was on hand to field some questions about the upcoming game from its influences to the direction the company took when developing the game’s lead character. Uncharted is scheduled to ship on the PS3 this November.

What were some of the films that inspired Uncharted in its development?

Amy: Well, we went back over the last hundred years or so, and really examined the whole history of the pulp adventure genre, in both books and movies. We immersed ourselves in the genre and came away with a big list of ideas, conventions and recurring themes that served as the backbone of our project throughout development.

I think the earliest movies we looked at were Fritz Lang’s The Spiders (1919), and other silent classics like The Thief of Baghdad (1924). We also watched a bunch of adventure films and serials from the ‘30s through the ‘50s, like Captain Blood, King Solomon’s Mines, Jungle Girl, Plunder of the Sun, Secret of the Incas, and Gunga Din. And of course we’ve watched the Indiana Jones films over and over, as well as The Mummy movies, and more recent films like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code.

It’s interesting when you study all these films (as well as the old pulps like Doc Savage, and comics like Tintin), how certain conventions and themes come up again and again. You can see how everyone’s playing in the same sandbox, paying homage to the past and reinventing the genre with each new iteration. We thought it would be a lot of fun to play in the same sandbox.

What were some games that inspired it?

Amy: Obviously we’re big fans of the adventure genre. We all love the Prince of Persia games (going back to the original), Delphine’s games (Another World, Flashback), Ico, Tomb Raider – all the great cinematic action/adventure games with that grand sense of exploration and discovery. And although it’s in a different category, the Legend of Zelda series has always been a huge inspiration.

For the gunplay, we knew we needed to emulate the fast-and-loose, almost Western style of gunplay found in adventure movies, where the hero scrambles and dives for cover, shooting around walls while bullets ricochet around him. But most of the gunplay in games is more tactical and military. We played a lot of kill.switch to study their cover system, and were inspired of course to see what Gears of War did with the same concept.

After creating the widely success Jak & Daxter series, why go on to a new franchise?

Amy: With the move to PlayStation 3, we wanted to strike out in a new direction, just like we did with Jak on the PS2. Each new hardware generation gives us a fresh opportunity to start with a blank slate, and leap into the creative void, so to speak. And the power of the PS3 hardware really opened up new possibilities to create a realistic world and believable human characters, so we wanted to explore that.

How did the team go about creating the lead character, Nathan Drake?

Amy: Well, once we established that we were going to embrace the pulp adventure genre, we knew that our hero had to have certain qualities. The best adventure heroes are essentially ordinary, believable guys – but what makes them extraordinary is their wit, their resourcefulness, their humor and their tenacity. So we realized we not only had to cast the role carefully (and we found a great actor in Nolan North), but we needed to model him with an “everyman” quality, and we had to write a bunch of proprietary code to give him (and the other characters) an emotional reality we hadn’t seen in games before.

We deliberately costumed him very simply, in his t-shirt and jeans, because we wanted him to be almost a blank slate, to give him the “everyman” quality we were going for. To give his motion a believable human quality, we created a layered-animation system that allows us to blend animations for an almost infinite variety of poses, reactions and emotions. And we gave him a very complex facial rig, and used wrinkle-mapping technology on his face, to give him a greater sense of emotional reality both during gameplay and in the cinematic cutscenes.

Ultimately, we wanted him to be a fallible hero, with all the human frailty that makes heroes endearing. He gets dirty and sweaty; he reacts realistically when under gunfire, flinching and wincing; he doesn’t always land his jumps gracefully, and stumbles sometimes under pressure. We want him to feel like a real flesh-and-blood guy, right at the limit of his ability. That’s the great tradition of pulp adventure heroes.

What sets Uncharted apart from other action games on the market?

Amy: It seems like the majority of action games out there these days are sort of dark and gritty, set in these desaturated, post-apocalyptic worlds. We really wanted to embrace the beauty and “romance” of the pulp adventure genre, capturing the spirit of those vibrant pulp magazine covers, and to establish a stylized, painterly reality for our game. There’s a sense of humor and optimism in the adventure genre that feels to me like a lot of the current games on the market lack.

Will the game have a multiplayer element?

Amy: No, this one’s a purely single-player experience.

Why not?

Amy: It’s a story-driven adventure, so we just really wanted to focus on Nate and his world, and immerse the player in the story we were telling.

What can you tell us about the game’s weapons? Vehicles?

Amy: Because Drake’s plane is shot down as soon as he approaches the uncharted island where the majority of our game takes place, he’s thrown into the adventure with pretty much just the clothes on his back. As a result, he has to scramble to acquire whatever weapons he can, snagging guns off the modern-day pirates who’ve set up camp on the island.

He can carry one handgun and one long gun at a time, so the player will continually be switching out weapons throughout the game, dropping one gun in favor of another, picking up a new weapon with a full ammo clip, etc. There are over a dozen different gun types in the game, ranging from 9mm pistols and more powerful handguns, to assault rifles, shotguns, even a handheld grenade launcher. Drake can also carry a few hand grenades which he can lob at enemies.

We have a couple of vehicle sequences in the game. In one sequence, Drake and Elena escape from the pirates in a commandeered Land Cruiser, racing through the jungle with Elena driving while Drake blasts their pursuers with a big gun mounted in the back. Later on, they also find an old personal watercraft that the pirates have brought to the island, and use it to explore the flooded ruins of the old colony.

Are you guys looking into any connectivity possibilities with the PSP?

Amy: No, we’ve focused all of our energies on delivering the best possible experience on the PlayStation 3.

Any thoughts on what you’d like to do in a sequel?

Amy: We’ve got lots of ideas, but nothing firmly established (or at least nothing we’re prepared to talk about yet) – we’ve got to finish this one first! But it’s a huge sandbox, with a lot of possibilities and a rich tradition of ideas and themes to draw from, so we’re excited to keep building the franchise.

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