Naughty Dog Designer Called Uncharted Development "a Real Hell" Because of PS3 and Attempts to Imitate Gears of War and Tomb Raider

The first Nathan Drake adventure launched in November 2007 and marked a complete reinvention for Naughty Dog: the studio left its cartoonish platformers behind and dove into a cinematic third-person shooter. As it turns out, that transition cost a lot more than it looked like from the outside.

Benson Russell, one of the designers on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, told FRVR that production turned into a drawn-out crisis. The main culprit was a decision to scrap all the PlayStation 2-era groundwork and build the PS3 tech from scratch.

Uncharted 1 went through a whole lot of hell during development. They made a decision when going to PlayStation 3 that they were going to ditch all the old tech and rewrite all new stuff from scratch. Well, that caused a lot of problems because systems came online way later than they should be. So you have this issue of, like, they were still doing paper design… and artists were just making cool art because there was no gameplay.

Without a working prototype for most of production, the team had no way to test ideas in practice. Levels, animations, and environments came together mostly blind, without any real sense of how the shooting and controls would eventually feel.

Naughty Dog staff have admitted more than once that Gears of War, released on Xbox 360 in late 2006, ended up shaping the final look of the series. Tools programmer Lucas Pope said back in 2019 that the gameplay got reworked in the last six months of development – before that, the controls were closer to classic Tomb Raider, and the cover-based shooting only showed up after the team got a look at what Epic Games had done.

According to Russell, that last-minute scramble is exactly what created the split personality players and critics complained about. The game tried to be both a cover shooter and an exploration adventure through ancient ruins at the same time, without fully committing to either.

You can tell it's rough around the edges. And also a lot of people commented that it didn't know what it wanted to be. Because it was influenced by Gears of War, 100%, but it was also this Tomb Raider style adventure game, but it didn't really pick a lane. It felt like it wanted to be both at the same time, but neither at the same time.

Even so, Russell doesn't walk away from the result. He calls the first game "a great achievement" and says he's "proud" of it, especially for "how it redefined certain things" and "led to Uncharted 2 and stuff like that."

But as a developer, I know all the s**t that went into it. It definitely is rough around the edges and I would love to go back and do some things, but hey, that's history, right? It goes into the annals of history and people play it.

The final tally speaks for itself: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was followed by Among Thieves, Drake's Deception, and A Thief's End, plus the standalone The Lost Legacy, the 2015 remaster collection The Nathan Drake Collection, the Legacy of Thieves Collection re-release for PS5 and PC, and a 2022 movie adaptation starring Tom Holland.