Interviews// Naughty Dog on Uncharted 3

SPOnG: Uncharted is one of the best examples of video games that introduce interactive cinematics, that allow you to take part in something like a ‘movie’ without making you feel like you’ve lost control of the game. Many other game developers have tried this and failed - where do you think they’ve gone wrong?

Arne Meyer: It’s a really tricky thing! You know, beyond anyone doing anything wrong, it’s just really difficult to do it. It’s something that we spent a lot of time on to refine the process of how we get there, the transitions between scenes.

Justin Richmond: And it’s something you have to think about all the time, right? It has to be front-and-centre of what you’re doing. It’s got to be cinematic, it’s got to make sense for the story, it’s got to be tied into the story, it’s got to feel like you’re playing all the time... and so it’s just a fundamental from the ground up.

You can’t, I think it’s something that’s very hard to ‘add on’ to a game. If you haven’t ever designed a game that way, it’s very difficult to interject that into something that’s already under way. It’s much easier to start at the beginning of the process and do that.

I also think we have amazing people who work for us, and that’s a huge piece of the pie. We hire very carefully, and we expect people we hire to work at a very high level and to own what they’re working on. What you get out of that is that every single person in the studio has a great deal of ownership over what they’re doing and what the game comes out like.

People will fight for what they want, and what they think is really good. So, the level guy will come up and say, "This sucks" to the designer and the designer might look at it and go, "You’re right, this does suck" and they’ll work together to figure something out. Because everybody has that ownership, you see throughout the entire process that the game is being constantly refined before it even gets to the play testers.


SPOnG: Naughty Dog is now seen these days as the ‘Uncharted Studio’ - do you think you guys might explore other IPs in the future?

Justin Richmond: Yeah. For sure. We did Crash, right, then we did Jak, and now we’re doing Uncharted.

Some day we’ll get bored and won’t want to work on these any more, and so we’ll do something else. We’re not going anywhere. We love doing this, and we have lots of people who have been at this studio for ten to fifteen years, who have seen through all these franchises. Some day, there will come a day when we won’t make Uncharted games anymore, we’ll do something else for sure.

But for now, we’re just fully concentrated on Nathan Drake. We try to concentrate on one thing at a time. When you do that, it’s a lot easier - you have everyone on the studio pushing towards the same goal for multiple years.


SPOnG: Do you guys think you would put your foot down over certain things when it comes to the Uncharted movie? I remember Nolan North saying something along the lines of not being approached for the role of Nathan Drake in the film - if he whinged enough to you guys would you be able to sort that out for him?

Justin Richmond: I don’t think we’d have much sway [laughs]!

Arne Meyer: At the end of the day, the movie studio knows how the make movies, right? We know how to make games. It would be unbecoming of us to try and impose our will, because we don’t know what would make a good movie. We don’t know what the right decisions would be.

Justin Richmond: I think if we had a movie guy come up and tell us, "You should do this with your game," we’d just laugh at them. So, it’d be the same the other way around.


SPOnG: Well, there is the argument that video game movies aren’t really all that...

Justin Richmond: I think the reason for that, a lot of the time, is if you’re starting with a franchise that isn’t great to begin with you’re going to find that hard. Starting with a game that isn’t all that amazing... or, if you try to rush it, which this movie studio clearly isn’t doing.

What you don’t want is someone who just makes a movie like this because it’s an easy pay-cheque. You want someone who’s going to come in and want to make the film because they think it’s awesome. That seems like the kind of guy Neil Burger is. He’s a guy who loves games, who loves what we’ve done with our franchises and wants to take it a step further. That’s a good sign.

That’s a step in the right direction, because what you don’t want is someone who’s just going to stamp it out. “Oh, it’s a game, it’s popular, we should make a movie out of it” - that’s not what we want. We want somebody who’s onboard 100% with what we’re trying to do with the franchise.

Arne Meyer: It helps if you’re not trying to stay too close to a straight adaptation as well. I think it’s very difficult for anybody from any medium to take that direct leap. They have to realise that you have to take advantage of the medium that you’re in, and use the freedom that you should have when you’re adapting something to do the right thing for what a film is.

You shouldn’t try to be slavishly faithful to the source material, but say ‘okay, we want to tell a really interesting story in this medium.’ You can still make great movies if you do that, but I think that if you allow yourself to be inspired by what the source material is and you allow yourself a bit more freedom, you can come up with a high quality product.


SPOnG: Thank you guys for your time.

Justin Richmond: Thank you.

Arne Meyer: Thanks!


Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is landing on the PlayStation 3 on 2nd November.