Drake’s Fortune: Naughty Dog’s Pilot [Part One]
Looking back to November 2007 and trying to remember what was happening in my life when Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out has been an empty venture. I was a sophomore in college, but I don’t remember if I ended up playing this game while at my college house or when I went home for Thanksgiving. Was I still lamenting my purchase of a PS3? Had I struck for massive damage and gotten over the fact giant enemy crabs existed at one point in Japanese history? I really don’t know because November 2007 is this weird dead zone in my memory banks.
I’m surprised I don’t remember more about what was happening around me at the time because Drake’s Fortune has always stuck with me, which is not something I say very often about games. I very much tend to play a game, take it in and move on — most types of media works like this in my brain.
On top of that, I never replay games, like, ever. Nevertheless, I have become a sucker for HD remasters. Much like the Criterion Collection, or things of that ilk, I’ll dip back in and consider something a new experience if it has new packaging and new touches. I don’t know why this is the case — marketers would have to explain that to me — but the Uncharted Collection on PS4 has been my chance to replay a game I look back on with fond memories.
However, replaying a game after eight-plus years is entirely unlike playing a new game. I had to battle with old memories as they crashed against new ones. As a fun side project, I was also paying attention to how games have or have not evolved. My old experiences fused with my new experiences to create an alternate Uncharted timeline that will forever exist now. The love for Uncharted is still my constant in these dueling timelines, which keeps me from having constant nosebleeds, but this Uncharted Super Master HD experience is the one that combines new and old to give way to what follows…
New, Old, and Forgotten Memories
The logic of 400-year-old barrels exploding with a single shot are alive and well forever and always in video games. And those explosion effects are still as dope in 2017 as they were in 2007.
So remember how I said I remembered all those things about my old experience playing Uncharted? Well, maybe I just remember the good stuff from Drake’s Fortune — memories can be like that. The intro feels restrictive and eight years old; our master explorer is stuck on a small boat learning the controls.
But no, wait, it quickly gets good soon after.
Phew.
Restrictive intro aside, the rest of the prologue still washes back over me, specifically the way Drake is immediately charismatic and clearly a video game protagonist (see: lovable psychopath). Pirates almost immediately come hunting for the treasure Drake and Elena (the strong female journalist who don’t take no guff) have discovered, which is the empty coffin of Francis Drake. Upon seeing the pirates, Elena says, “Shouldn’t we call for help?” Drake’s response is more or less, “Nah, this boat is illegal, we got no permits, and Panamanian jail is terrible so let’s just kill them all.”
Fair enough Nate. Totally rational response.
But what also stands out is how much the quality of the acting, the pacing and general direction works from the very beginning. Everybody recognizes this series is paying homage to Indiana Jones, but so many action games now pay homage to what Naughty Dog figured out in Drake’s Fortune. Drake’s Fortune really stands out as a game that nailed the long pause and the idea of beauty at every turn.
The game has a confidence about it that does not always shine through in its gameplay, but always shines through in its quiet moments and cutscenes. I remember the cutscenes being longer, but they’re really quite short. They’re a minute, sometimes two, but they all play out and tie things together. Uncharted also gets a nice “found footage” concept going during the intro. For much of the game, Elena has a video camera that is sometimes used in these cutscenes, and it still feels novel to see a video game through the lens of a video camera in 2016.
Getting to experience these positives, plus liking all the main characters you’re introduced to in the opening 20 minutes (still a novel concept to some degree in video games), means the shaky gameplay during the intro did not stop me from pressing on.
After the intro, a double cross goes down, and Sully (the old friend and partner) and Nate head into the jungle to look for El Dorado sans-a-stranded-on-an-island-with-no-boat Elena.
The belt flashlight, so hot right now.
The game’s confidence comes to the forefront at this point. Using a long pause in the action, the next 30 minutes give birth to some of the most iconic Uncharted elements. The game eschews combat during this time, and that feels like a really ballsy decision in 2007 (pre-Walking Simulator era). At no other point in the game are you just walking and climbing for this amount of time with no interruption for a shoot-shoot-bang-bang section. (I should mention there is one Crash Bandicoot-type encounter where you run towards the screen while escaping an oncoming boulder, which is a spectacle that breaks up the calm of basic puzzles and climbing sequences.)
So you get your blam-blam shootout on in the intro, but it’s during the ridiculous climbing, back-and-forth banter and holy-shit beauty that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune just becomes Uncharted™.
You go and jump in some water, enjoying what the water effects do to Drake’s clothes. He will eventually dry off, but that’s okay, you’ll go and dunk him again because it looks so good. As you continue through the jungle, you grow to appreciate Drake’s masterful half-tuck and how he’s the epitome of the stylistic bed head adventure bro you don’t despise. Sully gets in his first one-liner about “escorts” as he says, “like trying to find a bride in a brothel” to explain how hard it is to find what they’re looking for at this point — I believe the Sully one-liner about escorts becomes an in-joke for the series if my memory of the other games is to be believed.
The belt flashlight soon makes its appearance, and it’s as cool as it sounds. After all, Drake doesn’t have time to hold his flashlight, his arms and hands need to be unfettered as he scurries through old ruins. This all gives way to a German U-boat stranded in a waterfall in the jungle. Oh, and Chekhov’s gun makes its first of many appearances in Uncharted.
“Hey Sully, hold my journal ’cause I don’t want it to get wet while I’m searching this German U-boat in the jungle…Don’t look at me like that, it will end up saving your life when you get shot in the heart. Yeah, you’re welcome.”
“Hey Sully, hold my journal ’cause I don’t want it to get wet while I’m searching this German U-boat in the jungle…Don’t look at me like that, it will end up saving your life when you get shot in the heart. Yeah, you’re welcome.”
Foreshadowing continues to come to the forefront while exploring the U-boat as Drake talks about finding dead Germans being torn apart and so forth, and this is all a good way of trying to soften the shock of the later reveal of CURSED SPANISH MONSTER PEOPLE. More than that though, approaching the U-boat gives way to what I feel is the first “burst” of beauty at every turn.
In 2017, there are a lot of teams who are good at creating insane skyboxes. But the PS3-era was home of games like Ratchet and Clank and Killzone, which helped cement the “HD-era” as one that could at least create impressive looking spaces. The Halo franchise has always been one of my favorites — the “in my days” old fogie of the skybox world — and Destiny only did more to confirm Bungie’s skill in this area, not even to mention how Destiny 2 went even further beyond.
But what Uncharted did for me was sustain that beauty, and then highlight it with “GUH SO PURDY” moments. The PS3/360 era was really, super weird that first year or two. Like, it seemed nobody knew what to do. I’m not sure if everyone ever figured it out, but games like Uncharted at least cemented the fact that these games could be amazing to look at both on a technical level and just a straight up “that looks totes like real life” level, which was a first for video games to me.
I experienced my first “GUH” moment while climbing up a mountain to find a way onto the U-boat (seen in the image above). It’s special. The fact that the PS4 version of the game now has a “picture mode” really only serves to showcase this element.
Even more than the beauty itself, what Uncharted also did to separate itself was combine these skyboxes with the Shadow of the Colossus mindset of being the small fish in the big sea. Uncharted is far more dense in terms of art assets than Shadow of the Colossus, but both games make you feel really small at times, and also make you appreciate what you have just pulled off when you reach your destination.
Drake is in this photo, he’s just really hard to see because everything else is so much bigger than him, including that big rock fortress he’s about to climb.
Shadow of the Colossus would generally use the size and scale of the creatures you were climbing to showcase this element (sans that one temple or whatever you could climb if you got enough grip strength), while Uncharted uses far-off objects or massive pieces of interactive scenery to pull off the same small-fish-in-a-big-sea feel. But the point of both is you interact with these elements in the environment. You don’t feel small simply because you’re in a big, beautiful space. You feel small because you’re literally minuscule when interacting with these other objects in the world.
For more of Chase’s work, you can find him at @ChaseBecotte on Twitter. Part two of “Drake’s Fortune: Naughty Dog’s Pilot” will be posted this time next week (Tuesday, November 14th).
