Uncharted

• 1. Introduction

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  By December 2017, the Uncharted series had sold 41.7 million units worldwide. Uncharted is an action-adventure franchise developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Amy Hennig created it. Its heroes are treasure hunters who cross the globe to solve historical mysteries. Real people and real events share the stage with folklore, fantasy and invented characters. The first game arrived in 2007 as a PlayStation title. In the years since, the series has grown to include sequels, spin-offs, remasters, comics, a novel and a feature film. Who sits at the center of these adventures, and how much of the hero came from the actor who voiced him? What does a player actually do in one of these games? And how did a handful of treasure hunts become one of the best-selling franchises in video games?

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• 2. The Everyman Hero

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  Nolan North did not simply read Nathan Drake's lines. He ad-libbed portions of the dialogue and improvised numerous scenes, mixing his own personality into the character.

  Drake is a professional treasure hunter with a shady background. He is physically fit, highly intelligent, and self-taught in history and several languages. He is also a supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake.

  Naughty Dog refused to give him a bland personality. Drake thinks out loud, comments on the absurd situations he lands in, and complains about them as they happen.

  His looks are deliberately ordinary. He is handsome but not excessively muscular, and he usually wears a plain shirt and jeans to suit the everyman persona.

  The team also set a casting rule. Prominent characters would be voiced by lower profile actors. Only three characters have featured in every main installment of the series.

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• 3. The Companions

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  Emily Rose, who voices the journalist Elena Fisher, once described how the character changes over the games. She said: "in the first game, she's a lot younger, she's a lot more naive, and she looks at things as being very possible, and in the second game, has seen murders and adventure... the way that any person grows, you see that in her. She's a little bit more hesitant, a little more cynical".

  Elena is an investigative journalist who keeps ending up on the same expeditions as Drake. Naughty Dog first designed her purely as a sidekick and romantic interest, with a personality that complemented his. She grew into someone as capable as Drake in gun battles and resourcefulness. She and Drake begin a relationship, eventually marry, and have a child.

  Claudia Black plays Chloe Frazer, the only other character the player controls in the single-player main series. Chloe was designed as a darker version of Drake and a stark contrast to Elena. She is impulsive, reckless, witty, devious and fun-seeking. At first she seems selfish, caring only about her goal, but she later proves loyal and determined. Black also ad-libbed some of her dialogue.

  Richard McGonagle plays Victor Sullivan, a former U.S. Navy officer who can navigate planes and submarines and steer by the stars. He is Drake's mentor and father figure, having picked Drake up as a wandering orphan in Colombia. Naughty Dog gave him the everyman treatment too, with odd guayabera-style shirts, khaki pants and cigars. He is constantly in debt, and he often relies on other people to fund the pair's adventures.

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• 4. Climbing, Shooting, Surviving

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  A player in an Uncharted game can carry only three kinds of gear: a sidearm such as a pistol, a primary weapon such as a rifle or shotgun, and a handful of grenades. Weapons come from downed enemies or from spots scattered around the maps. Shooting is central, because the player must get past a string of foes. A player who dies respawns at a level checkpoint.

  Between gunfights, the games demand physical feats. Players jump, swim, grab and shuffle along ledges, and climb or swing from ropes. Puzzle solving appears regularly too. The camera sits behind the character in third person, and the levels follow a single linear track, as in traditional action games.

  Later titles loosened that structure. Driving and boat riding were added, along with open world elements that encourage free roaming for collectibles or stealth to avoid enemies. A Thief's End developed vehicle use further, letting players take vehicles wherever they like, though a car must still be driven to a set location to advance the story. That game also expanded role-playing into side discussions with other characters.

  Multiplayer began with Among Thieves, in both co-operative and competitive forms. Co-op lets up to three players take the roles of Drake and two other hero companions on missions built around gunfights, platforming and teamwork. Players can help comrades who are critically injured or grabbed by an enemy.

  Competitive play supports a maximum of ten players, split into two teams of five, across six modes. These include single or team-based deathmatches and team-based objectives. A Thief's End added a survival mode, with wave-based progression against swarms of increasingly powerful enemies. Across multiplayer, players earn points and ranks, which buy skins for both heroes and villains.

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• 5. Around the World

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  Among Thieves was the first game in the series to experiment with several locales. It moves from the snow-capped mountains of the Tibetan Plateau in southernmost China to a museum in Istanbul, the jungles of Borneo and the urban landscapes of Nepal.

  The first game, Drake's Fortune, stays closer to one region. It is set off the coast of Panama, in the Amazon rainforest, and on an uncharted island off the coast of South America. Drake's Deception then followed the multi-locale idea through the streets of London and Cartagena, Colombia, a château in France, a castle in Syria, a city in Yemen, and the vast deserts of the Rub' al Khali.

  A Thief's End features a Panamanian jail, an estate in Italy, a cathedral in Scotland, several locations in Madagascar, and uncharted islands in the Indian Ocean near Africa that reflect Libertalia. Boston and New Orleans also appear, in the past and the present respectively.

  The prequel Golden Abyss places a dig site and other locales in the forests of Panama. The standalone expansion The Lost Legacy moves to the mountain ranges of the Western Ghats in India, with a small bazaar and a city in Tamil Nadu.

  Many of these places were researched in person. The development team organized field trips with tour guides and architectural historians, and they brought back photos and hours of video footage to get the settings right.

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• 6. Platforms and Spin-offs

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  In 2007, before the first game even reached shelves, an online game called Drake's Trail told a prequel story in ten chapters. It is now defunct. Players followed the journalist Elena Fisher as she hired a private detective to find the famous treasure hunter Nathan Drake, convinced he was onto something big. It was browser-based, with alternative reality elements. A Google Maps plugin located game areas in the real world, and a Flash Player let players search fictional places, such as Drake's apartment, for clues.

  Drake's Fortune followed in November 2007 on PlayStation 3. Naughty Dog agreed to release the next two main installments exclusively on Sony systems as well. Among Thieves, in 2009, ran on an improved proprietary engine that let the creative team use more of the console's random-access memory. The result was greater free roam, expanded combat abilities and a larger map.

  A Thief's End moved to PlayStation 4 and focused on realism and detail. It was the last game in the series to feature the main protagonist. It was released to massive financial success and broke multiple records. A free-to-play title for iOS and Android, Fortune Hunter, was released to tie in with it.

  Other platforms brought other formats. Golden Abyss, in 2011, was the series' first handheld game, on PlayStation Vita. It is considered a prequel, although some developers have said it works as a separate, original story. In 2012, One Loop Games developed Fight for Fortune, a turn-based card game with interactive elements suited to the Vita.

  The Nathan Drake Collection, a remaster of the first three games, was ported to PlayStation 4 by Bluepoint Games in October 2015. It was released to make up for the delay of A Thief's End, which had been slated for summer 2015. It included a voucher for the multiplayer beta of that game, and it left out the multiplayer modes of the second and third games. Sony offered it free as part of its Play at Home initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic, in April and May 2020.

  The Lost Legacy, released in 2017 on PlayStation 4, was the first entry without Drake. It stars Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross, who had appeared in earlier games. The Legacy of Thieves Collection, a remaster of A Thief's End and The Lost Legacy, came to PlayStation 5 on the 28th of January 2022. A Windows version, developed with Iron Galaxy, followed on the 19th of October 2022.

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• 7. Awards and Sales

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  Uncharted 2: Among Thieves collected over fifty Game of the Year awards, and critics heralded it as a gaming milestone. It sits among the highest-rated PlayStation 3 games on Metacritic and is considered one of the greatest games of all time. It won the most Game of the Year awards of 2009, including honors at that year's Spike Video Game Awards and the 2010 BAFTA Game Awards. It also took Game of the Year at both the Interactive Achievement Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

  Other entries were honored too. IGN named Drake's Fortune its PS3 Game of the Year. Drake's Deception won a Writers Guild of America award for videogame writing. A Thief's End won the most Game of the Year awards of 2016, plus Best Narrative and Best Performance at The Game Awards 2016 and Best Game at the 13th British Academy Games Awards.

  Critics praised the stories, characters, voice acting, gameplay and graphics. They often compared the high production value to Hollywood action-adventure films, and they credited the series with raising the bar for single-player action-adventure games. GamesRadar ranked it the second best franchise of the seventh generation. Nathan Drake is seen as a PlayStation mascot, and the series is widely credited with lifting Naughty Dog's reputation.

  Sales grew with each release. Among Thieves was the highest-selling game in the month it came out, and the early games had together sold over 13 million copies by 2011. Naughty Dog's product marketing manager, Asad Quizilbash, said Uncharted 3 sold more than double its predecessor, far beyond expectations, bringing the series to verified sales of over 17 million. Before A Thief's End, Sony said the series had passed 28 million copies. That fourth game became the best seller of all, with over 18 million copies sold.

  Even the quieter releases earned recognition. The Lost Legacy won two categories at the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards, and it took the People's Voice prize for music and sound design at the Webby Awards.

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• 8. Beyond the Console

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  On the 23rd of October 2009, Sony Computer Entertainment America released the first part of Eye of Indra, a four-part motion comic that serves as a prequel to Drake's Fortune. Part two came on the 25th of November, and parts three and four arrived together on the 7th of December. A separate motion comic adapted the prologue of Drake's Fortune itself, from the discovery of Francis Drake's coffin to the first meeting with Gabriel Roman, reusing the game's voice clips.

  DC Comics released a six-issue Uncharted miniseries around the launch of Uncharted 3, starting on the 30th of November 2011. Joshua Williamson wrote it, Sergio Sandoval drew it, and Adam Hughes painted the covers. In it, a quest for the legendary Amber Room sends Drake on a journey to the Hollow Earth.

  In October 2011, Del Rey Books published a novel, Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth, by Christopher Golden. It follows a search for Daedalus's Labyrinth, the maze that held the Minotaur of Greek mythology. Bandai published a board game in 2012, designed by Hayato Kisaragi, in which two to four players compete for treasure and fight enemies.

  In July 2018, director Allan Ungar posted a fan-made short film of 15 minutes. It starred Nathan Fillion as Drake, who had campaigned for the role for years. It also featured Stephen Lang as Sullivan, Mircea Monroe as Elena, and appearances by Ernie Reyes Jr. and Geno Segers. Viewers praised Fillion's performance and an action sequence shot over the shoulder, like the games' shooting scenes. Naughty Dog's vice-president, Druckmann, tweeted a heart emoji, and the film director Shawn Levy also praised it.

  The official film was directed by Ruben Fleischer from a script by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. Tom Holland, who also served as an executive producer, played Drake, and Mark Wahlberg played Sullivan. Antonio Banderas, Sophia Taylor Ali and Tati Gabrielle took supporting roles. Columbia Pictures, Atlas Entertainment and Arad Productions produced it, with PlayStation Productions as executive producer and Sony Pictures Releasing as distributor. It opened in United States theaters on the 18th of February 2022.

  A "storycoaster" based on that film, Uncharted: The Enigma of Penitence, opened at PortAventura Park on the 17th of June 2023. In August 2023, producer Charles Roven said the studio was "definitely looking to make" a sequel, and Sony confirmed one was in development by June 2024.

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