On the occasion of the free temporary availability of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, we recall a memorable moment in the saga.
This article includes details and storylines from the first chapter of Uncharted 2.
It is as complex to start a great story well as to finish it. Uncharted has become, in just over a decade, one of the emblems of PlayStation. Thinking of Nathan Drake is synonymous with adventure, how to transfer a fast-paced action movie into our hands without giving up on the way to gameplay, charismatic characters and the ability to dazzle half the world. We don't know if there will be more Uncharted deliveries in the future; But, for many years that have passed, the launch of Uncharted 2 will continue to be one of the best we can remember in the modern industry.
Obviously, you have to put things in context. The impact of currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or the first Halo may not be equal to what they evoked at launch. The sector has enjoyed great moments for more and more studies and the margin to surprise is reduced. Therefore, surely that first chapter, Between the sword and the wall of Uncharted 2 does not surprise as much today as it did back in 2009, when PS3 Slim hit the market and there were more and more reasons to think that getting hold of the console was a good idea.
They say that there are games that sell consoles and, judging from our own experience, this sequel showed at the same time that the saying that "second parts were never good" is not entirely accurate. Not with Nathan Drake. Now that Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection is free on the occasion of Sony's Play at Home action to collaborate in the fight against the coronavirus, we return to that moment.
Let's talk about the train scene
It's only fifteen minutes, but what fifteen minutes. Especially considering what the first Uncharted: Drake's Treasure was, released in 2007 for PS3. An experimental video game, with certain defects and seams that are now more visible than before due precisely to the playable and design-level improvements that were introduced in subsequent iterations.
Uncharted 2 (2009) | Naughty dog
Imagine an approach where the main story begins right at a moment of tension at the knot of the adventure; a flashforward. Once completed, with the heart at one hundred and without understanding very well what has happened, how we have got there and how we have come out alive, we are going to the real beginning. The impression of that chapter, of that scene where the train defies the laws of gravity, perhaps would not have been such if we had seen it on screen after seven hours playing. It was in minute one, without warning, without room for maneuver.
The scene had everything. Shortly after waking up, without knowing how, where or when, we were hanging on a yellow bar – the first of hundreds, although we can talk about the color in the Uncharted saga at another time – and a clear photograph: we must reach the top , but underneath we have emptiness. The vertical train carriage and a lot of bars to get around until you reach the top to, with a little luck, survive. Along the way, a huge stone that falls without remorse, a clear effort to make the drawing distance generate a feeling of vertigo and more puzzles. For moments, the wagon looked like a diorama. The reward for brushing our heads on the snow was a flashback: turning back. Beer in hand and a paradisiacal environment. Where are we now? More unknowns. Thus began Uncharted 2.
If it's yellow, you have to grab it
Not even Naughty Dog expected this reception
Naughty Dog has not declined to respond in this regard when asked in different interviews about these moments. Both now and then. It is interesting the meeting that the Californian media granted to Gamasutra shortly after the game was put up for sale. Metacritic spoke in the voice of the press from around the world and that Christmas one of the names that more times if he was going to read in the list of gifts was "Uncharted". There was a reason.
"It is fucking great," Neil Druckmann said without hesitation as soon as the interview began, the then-leader of the company's design department and screenwriter. "It is really amazing." They were the first to get excited about Uncharted 2; So much for how it looked for its duration, where nothing was missing or missing, in his opinion. They had achieved what they half tried with the first part. "We were expecting him to receive good test scores and to do better than Uncharted 2, but this has surpassed all of our calculations."
Naughty Dog met right after publishing the first Uncharted to jointly reflect on the question many were asking after completing that embryonic Nate adventure: What is Uncharted really? With Jak & Daxter it was clear at the end of the trilogy that this couple was especially particular, that their platforming adventures were far from those of the Crash Bandicoot and those of the competition. Identity. "What are the things that define our world and our characters?" They asked.
Undesirable panorama is to fall short.
They put all the things on a list and, to give a blow on the table two years later, they condensed all that – shots, jumps, tension, action, a great protagonist … – in just a quarter of an hour and designed what is for many one of the best beginnings in the history of the video game; of those that appear on the same lists as the beginnings of Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill or The Last of Us, which in 2013 would reaffirm this fact with some similar elements, saving the distances, to that of Uncharted 2. Everything stays at home.
Druckmann recognized then that the first title of the license had great narrative moments, but not so many shocking scenes, those that are recorded in memory and that can be remembered a decade later. They wanted the second without giving up the first. “It is not just a level where the train is moving in a straight line. What many games do is that the train is still and the stage is the one that moves around us ”, he argues. "We turned that around." Indeed, the mountain did not move; on the screen, snowflakes as a dressing, as fireworks would do, but here the protagonist was the train, a real box of surprises about to fall to nothing.
Bruce Straley believes the key is that everyone knew how they had to do it
Its director, Bruce Straley, chatted with FreeGameTips last December in Bilbao on the occasion of Fun and Serious 2019. In the interview, it was inetivable to ask him about the future, but also about the past. His stage in Naughty Dog ended after 18 years of what he himself defines as great moments; the "golden age". If he had to keep one, however unfair the approach, he would stick with Uncharted 2. It was a change, the consolidation of the company's name as a first sword within the PlayStation label. "What we did at Naughty Dog was tremendous. From Uncharted 2 to The Last of Us, when we managed to integrate into scenes of the game itself what were once only cinematic… I think that all that was fantastic ”, he reflected. To which he added: “My favorite Naughty Dog game is Uncharted 2; It is the one where I had the best time working. Because taking over was something totally new to me; I was really clear on what I wanted to do with both the franchise and Nathan Drake himself. ”
Bruce Straley, at Fun and Serious 2019, Bilbao | FreeGameTips
Those who now approach 40 years of age were not, in some cases, even 30 years old. Now they are parents, before they were young people passionate about making history in the middle. “It was exciting to be able to work with such a talented team that was one level above the rest of the AAA industry. They were wanting to do something incredible and prove to themselves that they were capable of doing it, ”added the veteran Straley, who is now looking for other professional purposes.
The train scene was not going to be the beginning of the game originally
There's a lot we don't know about the development of Uncharted 2. Straley, in a meeting with Games Radar last year, revealed that this famous opening scene of the train was not originally planned as the beginning of the game. "That was not our start originally," he says. "It was more of a simple linear tree structure, which made it a little difficult to dive into the story." But Neil came and said that the scene that had to open the story of the game. “It was he (Neil) who came up with the idea of taking that section of the train and putting it right at the beginning; and then divide it at different points in history to create a timeline that jumps back and forth, "he confesses.
From the frozen cold to the heat of the sea in the blink of an eye.
Jonathan Stein, one of the game's designers, acknowledges that Druckmann himself was afraid of whether or not it was the right decision because of the nonlinear structure of the narrative, but “during development, there was an explosion of television series where there were trips storms and movies with more sophisticated narratives, ”so they finally felt more comfortable making that decision. The result is something that players must continue to judge. For our part, those fifteen minutes remain to this day the living history of the modern video game.
References
- Meeting with Bruce Straley, former director of Naughty Dog – FreeGameTips
- Reflecting On Uncharted 2: How They Did It; Kris Gradt – Gamasutra
- On Uncharted 2's 10th anniversary, its developers look back on the making of a perfect sequel; Alex Avard – Games Radar
