UNCHARTED 4 : A THIEF'S END # PART 1

Uncharted’s Nathan Drake is a modern-day treasure hunter who follows the maps of famous explorers to mythical MacGuffins like El Dorado (Drake’s Fortune), the Cintamani Stone (2009’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves), and the lost city of Ubar (2011’s Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception). Drake is a whiz at solving puzzles and can read the writing on any cave wall no matter what defunct language it’s in, but he can’t seem to go five minutes without tipping off bad guys to the location of the priceless artifact he’s pursuing, and he and his companions—usually his former girlfriend and current wife, Elena, and treasure-hunting mentor Sully—often find themselves being double-crossed, thrown out of cargo planes, and chased by henchmen through collapsing ruins. Basically, these are interactive Indiana Jones movies, with motion-capture acting and action-adventure cinematography good enough to be confused for the real thing. (Columbia Pictures has been trying to make a live-action Uncharted movie since 2009. David O. Russell took a turn at the script.)

In Uncharted 4, set a few years after Uncharted 3, Nathan Drake has settled into ordinary life with Elena, working for a marine salvage outfit that rescues non-priceless artifacts from drowned shipping containers. But then his long-missing older brother, Sam, shows up claiming to be in debt to some dangerous people who will kill him unless he and Nathan can lead them to pirate treasure. Druckmann was a little vague about why Naughty Dog decided to make this Uncharted’s final chapter, but when I asked for clarification, the company sent me an official statement: “Nate has been struggling his entire life [with] an obsession with lost treasure,” which has “damaged his personal relationships time and time again. We felt that to address this internal conflict one way or the other would be to ‘complete’ the character.”

The development of Uncharted 4, which began a little over four years ago, had its own plot twists. Amy Hennig, Naughty Dog’s former creative director who helmed the first three Uncharted games, left the company in March 2014 for never-explained reasons, passing the reins to Druckmann and game director Bruce Straley (who worked with her on the first two Uncharted games). Several other employees followed Hennig out the door, and a couple of Uncharted 4’s motion-capture stars made public gripes, including Nolan North, who plays Drake: “We had shot eight months of [Hennig’s] story, and it was all thrown away.” (Hennig, who now works for Electronic Arts, declined to comment.)

There was some initial worry about the regime change. “There’s a story that got out there about how I wanted to kill Elena in Uncharted 2, which is true,” says Druckmann. “I was pushing for that, but it wasn’t my call. So now everyone thinks, ‘Oh my God, Neil is going to kill Elena?’” Excitement for Uncharted 4 held steady, though, in part because Druckmann and Straley’s last major project for Naughty Dog was 2013’s survival-horror game The Last of Us, one of the most acclaimed games of the past decade. The premise: A brain-eating fungal infection has turned most Americans into zombielike creatures. You play as Joel, a 40-something man whose own daughter has died, escorting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl with an immunity to the disease, on a cross-country trip to visit doctors who might be able to turn her blood into a vaccine. If Uncharted is Indiana Jones, The Last of Us is The Road. Yes, you stab and strangle thousands of zombies over 20-odd hours of gameplay, but the real hook is the emotional action between main characters, who form a bond as plausible as any on, say, The Walking Dead. (The music by two-time Oscar winner Gustavo Santaolalla and near-photorealistic graphics help.) Even though reviews included descriptors like “literary,” The Last of Us sold more than 12 million copies.