Naughty Dog’s Uncharted franchise has one of the most iconic names in the industry, thanks to a trio of successful PlayStation 3 games. The action-packed trilogy has great characters, big setpiece moments, and tight combat, but Naughty Dog’s Co-President Evan Wells let IGN know that the actual name of the games was anything but concrete before release.
“The funny story behind [this] is, we put together this trailer for E3 to announce our game,” Wells said, referencing Sony’s infamous 2006 show. “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. 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.’”
But of course, it’s never that easy. Complications arose that forced the team to remove the name entirely before the video was shown.
“We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted],” Wells continued. “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.’”
The trailer ended with a simple “Naughty Dog” title, which left people to tag the game with the “Dude Raider” moniker. Three months later, Harrison caved and let Wells call the game Uncharted, but it’s a funny story nonetheless. That same name will carry on when the latest Uncharted game lands on PlayStation 4.
