Interview: Naughty Dog on Uncharted 2

Uncharted 2 is scheduled for release later this year exclusively on Playstation 3. For more information read our recent article on the game.

1. Please tell us about the inspiration for the Drake series and the sequel in particular?

When thinking about what to do with our next series, we narrowed down all our crazy game ideas and decided to stick with what we knew best, which was the action-adventure genre. But we wanted utilize the power of the PS3 to bring a level of cinematic immersion never before seen in a video game. With all of this new found power we would be able to tell a really engaging story, create compelling and believable characters and place them in exciting predicaments, just like the best summer blockbusters do. And one of the most important aspects to the Uncharted series is also what serves as the starting point and inspiration for the stories we tell in each game - a historical mystery.

Drake's new adventure is about an unsolved mystery surrounding Marco Polo and his doomed voyage home from China in 1292. After spending almost twenty years in the court of the emperor Kublai Khan, Marco Polo departed with fourteen ships and over 600 passengers and crew - but when he arrived at his destination a year and a half later, only one ship remained, and only eighteen of the passengers had survived. Although Marco Polo described almost every other aspect of his journeys in minute detail, he never revealed what happened to the ships that were lost.

So Drake, attracted by the potential treasure to be found and inspired by the intrigue around this historical mystery, embarks on a quest to find Marco Polo's lost fleet. But he soon discovers that Marco Polo was hiding a much greater secret - he had gone on a secret expedition on behalf of the emperor to find the mythical kingdom of Shambhala (otherwise known as Shangri-La) and to recover the legendary Cintamani Stone, the "wish-fulfilling jewel" of Buddhist mythology. The stone is described by Marco Polo as a massive raw sapphire which, if it truly exists, would be worth billions of dollars today. These discoveries set Drake on a new course, following Marco Polo's 700-year-old trail through a diverse range of exotic environments to find out if the lost city of Shambhala, rumored to lie deep in the Himalayas, really exists.

2. What movies or literature inspired you, and would it be correct to say that Drake is more Jack Colton (Romancing the Stone) than Indiana Jones?

Everyone at Naughty Dog draws upon a wide variety of personal and professional influences to inspire their work as we've developed the Uncharted franchise. It could be anything from films, books, other games or anything else. It's important to us and our process to have all these different influences, because we never know where a brilliant idea will come from. Even if it's on a subconscious level, all the media that we've consumed has had some influence on all of our games.

Another reason why things may look and feel familiar is that we wanted to leverage what we call the "comfort food" feeling of the action-adventure movie genre and translate that into a fun and satisfying experience when you play our games. This "comfort food" feeling comes from elements of movies that we have all grown up loving and often associate with specific genres - if one were to make a sci-fi game or a horror game, there are certain tropes or hallmarks of the genre that a developer will likely reference in one way or another.

We also had this notion of "comfort food" when we were creating the character of Nathan Drake. We knew we wanted to create a character with a deep backstory and some intriguing complexities to his personality. We also knew that we wanted Uncharted to be a franchise and not just a one off so that we can continue to expose that depth and complexity over the course of several games!

3. How difficult was it going from the Jak series to something completely different in the form of Uncharted, and why did you make the choice?

At the time we wanted to believe that the transition would be fairly easy between Jak and Daxter and Uncharted because the core of both series were the same - story-driven third-person action-adventure games. Of course, it was really not that simple since we were dealing with brand new, significantly more powerful hardware with the Playstation 3.

The fact that we had this exciting new hardware platform with so much potential was one of the main reasons we looked to start something new and different in the first place. The graphic fidelity offered by previous generations of PlayStation hardware was pretty limited, so we felt compelled to keep our games within the realm of fantasy. The PS3 was the first hardware that gave us the confidence to tackle the real world and human characters. And that decision forced us to develop a brand new set of skills in just about every discipline. From writing and game design, to modeling and lighting, every employee at Naughty Dog had to step up their game and learn something new. But we're really happy with what we were able to accomplish and now we feel more prepared to tackle any type of game we might consider in the future. Of course the immediate task at hand is to once again raise our own personal bar with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

4. What decisions during planning did you make to secure that Uncharted wouldn't be seen as "just another Tomb Raider clone"?