Uncharted: Drake's Fortune "is rough around the edges," ex-Naughty Do…

Despite an annoying difficulty curve that I'm now learning was the result of me being too lethal with a Desert Eagle, I have warm memories playing the original 2007 Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, even though I played it around 2010 after beating Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and wanting to learn more about this newfangled mass murderer, Nathan Drake. Even in retrospect, I liked the first Uncharted game and don't remember it being particularly janky, but one of the game's original designers, Benson Russell, has very different memories about its development and gameplay.

"Uncharted 1 went through a whole lot of hell during development," he tells FRVR. "They made a decision when going to PlayStation 3 that they were going to ditch all the old tech and rewrite all new stuff from scratch. Well, that caused a lot of problems because systems came online way later than they should be. So you have this issue of, like, they were still doing paper design… and artists were just making cool art because there was no gameplay."

Various Naughty Dog developers have opened up about Gears of War's seemingly pivotal influence on Uncharted over the years. Tools programmer Lucas Pope said back in 2019 that Uncharted's gameplay was essentially overhauled in the last six months of development following the release of Gears of War after originally mirroring Tomb Raider's control system. Now, Russell says it was precisely that lack of cohesion that led to a disjointed-feeling final product.

"You can tell it's rough around the edges," he says. "And also a lot of people commented that it didn't know what it wanted to be. Because it was influenced by Gears of War, 100%, but it was also this Tomb Raider style adventure game, but it didn't really pick a lane. It felt like it wanted to be both at the same time, but neither at the same time."

Hearing all of this, you might think Russell isn't the biggest fan of the first Uncharted, but he clarifies that he's still "proud" of it and thinks it was "a great achievement," especially with "how it redefined certain things" and "led to Uncharted 2 and stuff like that."

"But as a developer, I know all the s**t that went into it," he adds. "It definitely is rough around the edges and I would love to go back and do some things, but hey, that's history, right? It goes into the annals of history and people play it."

It's true. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune kicked off one of the most beloved video game franchises of all time and spawned three full sequels, a standalone spinoff game in The Lost Legacy, and a Hollywood adaptation starring Tom Holland. Whatever you think of the first game in the series, there's no denying its impact.

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Kris Roberts worked at Rockstar for years, first tuning the vehicles for the Midnight Club games and then leading the design of Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer modes. He says the final six months of development on Rockstar's cowboy epic was the worst period of crunch he's experienced in the game industry, and he argues that the overtime wasn't even really about making the game better. Instead, it was about putting on a show for executives.

With his transition from Midnight Club to Red Dead Redemption, Roberts went from an hourly employee to a "full-time" dev working what Rockstar called "core hours," as he explains in a new interview with Kiwi Talks on YouTube. "There was the expectation that you'll be there by 9:30 and we're going to stay until 6:00. If you're staying after that, there's dinner available and blah blah blah."

But those expectations changed over time. "Eventually core hours expanded to include half days on Saturday, where you were expected to be there," Roberts continues. "Then core hours expanded to be full days on Saturdays. Then Sunday was 'optional,' but encouraged. By the end, we were working every day, all day."

Roberts describes the last six months of work on Red Dead Redemption as a "blur," alluding to the delirious effects of sleep deprivation. "You end up in an amnesiac state where you probably don't have clear recollection or memory of exactly what was going on," he says.

Rockstar's history of crunch goes back years, and it became a matter of public debate around the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 – a debate the company responded to with testimonials from employees suggesting that things weren't actually so bad. But even now, allegations of overwork continue, and protections against crunch are a key point among the employees attempting to unionize at Rockstar.

For his part, Roberts feels "conflicted" about airing these old frustrations, in part because he pushed himself into "self-directed" crunch on Midnight Club. "I was doing that because I thought it was important or I wanted to be involved at that level and it was me doing it," he says.

But things were different with Red Dead Redemption, and Roberts is particularly frustrated by "artificial" incidents where Rockstar would declare "all hands on deck" overtime during weekend visits from executives like Sam Houser and Leslie Benzies.

"I remember a couple specific examples of a Friday afternoon, [when] management would send out an email that said, 'Just so we're all clear, we need to be here this weekend.' Then a follow-up email would say, 'And this weekend doesn't just mean Saturday.' I've made promises to my kids about what we're going to do this weekend. and Friday afternoon at 4:30 you're telling me I need to be here on Sunday regardless of what's going on. That's unacceptable," Roberts says.

"And it wasn't because, 'Oh, if you have a certain number of issues in Bugstar, or 'If you have critical things that must be fixed before the next build,' or 'If you have a legitimate business case for putting in that weekend time then we want you to be here.' It was more like, 'No, we need to put on the show of appearance that everybody's here all the time, because we have an executive visiting or something."

As multiplayer design lead, Roberts was then tasked with communicating these expectations to his team. This was a part of why he eventually said "I don't want to do this" and chose to leave the studio. "It was certainly in the top four" reasons for moving on, he jokes.

So, and you know there was the punchline for me of okay the expectation is I go to my team and tell my designers and people that you know okay we need to be here Sunday and it's like that was so challenging for me and that you know I think really was a component of what sort of pushed it over the edge for me as far as like I don't want to do this I mean whatever

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