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."
