We have often come across different revelations over time where a developer finally comes out in the open to discuss what was initially and what could have been for a game that it released a while back. And it seems like similar is the deal here with Naughty Dog’s massively popular title Uncharted.
Naughty Dog’s Co-President Evan Wells, during an interview that was conducted for a more extensive research on the History of Naughty Dog, told IGN that Uncharted was initially without any real name and that the name Uncharted actually dawned on the developing team much later.
“The funny story behind [this] is, we put together this trailer for E3 to announce our game,” Wells stated. “But we didn’t have a name yet. We had no idea what we were going to call it. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas. ‘Uncharted,’ actually, was on the table for a while. We went away from it.”
“Finally, for E3, we needed a name,” he added. “We put the name in the trailer. It was going to be Uncharted. We made our peace with it and said, ‘okay, this is going to be awesome.’”
However, things were not left without a number of complications, with one such complication even forcing the company to name the title ‘Dude Raider.’ And while as hilarious and weird as it sounds, Wells revealed that the name still sticks with the game to this day.
Wells explained: “We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted]. And then [former PlayStation Executive Vice-President and current Microsoft Corporate Vice-President] Phil Harrison caught wind of it, and he’s like, ‘no, we can’t name it Uncharted.’ In the UK, if you have a game that’s ‘uncharted,’ that means it didn’t do well, it didn’t crack the Top 10. So he said, ‘no, we can’t do that.’”
“But we had this trailer we were showing in the press conference. He says, ‘that’s okay, just don’t put a name on it.’ We’re like, ‘uh, okay.’ We had this whole end slate ready to go. I guess we’ll put the Naughty Dog logo up there? The [trailer] ends and it just says ‘Naughty Dog,’ and we still didn’t know what to call it.”
Later, lamenting the fact that fans on the Internet started coming up with precarious names for the then unnamed title, Wells added: “That’s when the ‘Dude Raider’ thing started coming up.”
“And then three months later, [Harrison] came around and said, ‘okay, you can do it.’”
And that’s the story of how Uncharted would later be known as Uncharted. Since ‘Dude Raider’ is not something that catches most of the fans’ attention. Not at least in the right way.
