During interviews conducted for IGN’s extensive History of Naughty Dog, Naughty Dog’s Co-President Evan Wells revealed an interesting story regarding the development of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, one specifically surrounding its title.

At Sony’s now-infamous E3 2006 press conference – the one where the company revealed PlayStation 3’s exorbitant $600 price tag – Naughty Dog’s new, much-anticipated project was set to be revealed. After working on cartoony, mascot-driven platformers for the past decade, Naughty Dog was ready to unveil its fresh, realistic new series: Uncharted.

“The funny story behind [this] is, we put together this trailer for E3 to announce our game,” Wells said. “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 continued. “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 an unexpected issue came up, one that saddled Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune with a nickname that still sticks with it to this day: Dude Raider.

“We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted],” Wells explained. “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.”

“That’s when the ‘Dude Raider’ thing started coming up,” Wells said, lamenting the title some folks on the Internet gave it in the absence of a real name. It appeared to be similar in nature to Lara Croft's Tomb Raider franchise, after all. “And then three months later, [Harrison] came around and said, ‘okay, you can do it.’” Uncharted would be called Uncharted, after all.

Much better than Dude Raider.

Well it's an exploring game about ancient relics, so it was always going to be attached to Tomb Raider. But that isn't a remotely bad thing. Both games are awesome.