Hennig briefly shows me the title page of the May 2005 concept document for "Zero Point," while Scherr describes that pitch as focusing on "zero point energy, eco-terrorism, dark energy, and all sorts of crazy nonsense." He continues, "At one point we wanted to set the entire thing in a vast underwater facility or city type of thing. Sitting down along with Wells is fellow co-president Christophe Balestra, creative director Amy Hennig, lead designer Richard Lemarchand, cinematics animation lead Josh Scherr, and actor Nolan North. For two and a half hours, I get to hear developers discuss topics such as the creation of the original game, and some of the major hurdles in creating this next installment. Two weeks before Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception hits shelves, I find myself in a conference room in Naughty Dog's office in Santa Monica. But then the PlayStation 3 got delayed, and we back-burnered all those ideas for about a year, and picked it up again right after Jak 3." Yes, Naughty Dog had already started prototyping ideas for their first "next-generation" console title way back in 2003 though, Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells elaborates, "When Jak 2 closed, that's when we started thinking about it. Those were some of the ideas that the developers at Naughty Dog threw around at the conclusion of Jak 2's production. Or that instead of playing "Uncharted" - which was about finding El Dorado, the mythical city of gold - you instead played a game called "Zero Point," focused on the concept of dark energy. Which reads much more like someone excitedly sharing fun trivia.Try to imagine an alternate universe where, instead of playing through a rollicking action-adventure with affable treasure hunter Nathan Drake, Uncharted took the form of a post-apocalyptic survival horror game. This is the only time I’ve seen it come up with this tone though, which is weird.Įdit: I didn’t make it clear earlier that the Twitter thread I’m referring to is from the same author as the article. Regardless, this fact about the game drawing from the Quran also comes up almost every year in TIL articles and even as recently as early November in a Twitter thread from this same journalist, Saniya Ahmed. I understand if the issue here is that the game itself doesn’t refer much to the religious text but from what I’ve come to understand that was a preemptive measure to prevent potential controversy after the stuff with the OG LittleBigPlanet soundtrack happened. For the mythology created for the game, ND blended those elements together as well as pieces of the accounts of several explorers, similar to how ND treated the mythology of El Dorado, and Bend treated the cities of Cibola. They mentioned how the Quran talks about King Solomon commanding Djinn, but never related it to Iram. The tone of that headline feels like it dug up dirt that ND tried to bury, but this has come up a lot in prerelease marketing for the game, notably at the AMC events, and was brought up in more detail during anniversary write ups. So, we were playing with these ridiculously wide shots with the camera hundreds of meters away from Drake, like a helicopter shot and still allowing the player to be in control."ĭoesn't sound like their sole inspiration for the game, more like for the cinematic scope of the shots/set-pieces.Įdit: Welp I'm out, I do want to play it eventually and now there are a bunch of spoilers. Lawrence of Arabia is mentioned once in that ND interview: "Our Lead Designer Richard Lemarchand really wanted to capture the epic cinematic scale of the desert and feeling of being lost, the way Lawrence of Arabia did. The only portion I am a bit eh on, is this line: "However, on the game's 10th anniversary, the develop ers once again cited Lawrence of Arabia as their sole inspiration". So I won't make any comment to the claims either way due to my ignorance. It was an interesting article for me, purely from an education perspective. I do not know the history, the tie-in's, nor have I played UC3.