Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Read online

  Of course, it’s easier to decide that you want to tell a subtle story than it is to—you know—tell a subtle story. For the second time in a decade, Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann discovered that starting a new intellectual property from scratch could be an excruciating process. And up until the very end, they thought The Last of Us would be a disaster. It was “the hardest project that I’d ever worked on in my life,” Straley said. He and Druckmann battled constantly as they tried to figure out how to balance poignant emotional beats with vicious zombie shoot-outs. They struggled with everything from the cover system to the story’s finale. Focus testers would suggest that they add more video game–y elements—boss battles, ultrapowerful weapons, special enemy classes—but Straley and Druckmann stuck with their vision, even as early testers warned them that reviews might be mediocre.

  Reviews were not mediocre. In June 2013, when The Last of Us came out, fans and critics wouldn’t stop raving. It was the most successful game in Naughty Dog’s history, turning Straley and Druckmann into game development rock stars and ensuring that they’d be project leads at Naughty Dog for as long as they wanted to be.

  During those same years, from 2011 to 2014, Amy Hennig spent her days working with a small team on Uncharted 4. They had some ideas for how to switch things up. They wanted to add vehicles, for one. Maybe a grappling hook. And, most surprisingly, they wanted to have Nathan Drake go half the game without picking up a gun. Critics had called out previous Uncharted games for the dissonance between their stories, in which Drake is an amiable, fun-loving hero, and their gameplay, in which Drake can murder thousands of enemy soldiers without missing a beat. Hennig and her team thought it might be an interesting twist for Drake to stick to melee for a while, to show that the puckish adventurer could change his ways.

  Uncharted 4, as Hennig envisioned it, would introduce the world to Nathan Drake’s old partner, Sam. We hadn’t seen Sam in previous Uncharted games, because for fifteen years Nathan had thought he was dead, left behind during a Panamanian prison escape gone awry. In Hennig’s version of Uncharted 4, Sam would be one of the main villains, bitter toward Nathan for leaving him to die. Over the course of the story, as Nathan tried to pull away from his roots as a treasure hunter, the player would find out that he and Sam were actually brothers. Eventually they’d heal their relationship and unify against the game’s real antagonist, a nasty thief named Rafe (voiced by the actor Alan Tudyk) who had served time with Sam in prison.

  But Uncharted 4 was struggling. Naughty Dog’s vision of itself as a two-team studio, able to develop two different games simultaneously, turned out to be too idealistic. Throughout 2012 and 2013, the Last of Us team needed to dragoon more and more of Uncharted 4’s developers, leaving Hennig with just a skeleton staff. “We were hoping that we’d have two completely staffed teams,” said Naughty Dog’s copresident, Evan Wells. “They’d just sort of leapfrogged each other, and we just couldn’t hire enough talent fast enough to keep up with the demands of the game’s expansions in terms of expectations of scope. At best we maybe got to one and a half, or probably more like one and a quarter teams.”

  At the beginning of 2014, as Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley finished up work on an expansion for The Last of Us called Left Behind, the studio went into emergency mode, calling several meetings in an attempt to diagnose the problems with Uncharted 4.

  There are conflicting perspectives on what happened next. Some say the Uncharted 4 team didn’t get the staff and resources it needed to survive, because The Last of Us and Left Behind had vacuumed up so much of Naughty Dog’s attention. Others say that Amy Hennig had trouble making decisions and that the nascent game wasn’t shaping up very well. Some who were working on Uncharted 4 wished that there was a more cohesive direction. Others thought it was perfectly understandable, considering how small the Uncharted 4 staff was, that the game hadn’t coalesced yet.

  One part of the story is indisputable, however: in March 2014, after meeting with Naughty Dog’s copresidents, Wells and Christophe Balestra, Amy Hennig exited the studio and didn’t come back. Hennig’s creative partner Justin Richmond left shortly afterward, as did a few other veterans who had worked closely with Hennig. “It’s something that happens at different levels,” said Wells. “It happened to happen at a fairly high level. But we have turnover for various reasons throughout the studio. And Amy’s a friend of mine—I really miss her and I wish her well—but things weren’t working out. So we went our separate ways, and we had to pick up the pieces.”

  The day after Hennig’s departure, the gaming website IGN reported, citing anonymous sources, that Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley had pushed her out. In public comments afterward, Naughty Dog’s leadership vehemently disputed that account, calling it “unprofessionally misreported.” The studio didn’t elaborate further, and Hennig remained quiet about what had gone down. “It was hurtful to get those rumors published out there, because we saw our employees’ names being attached to that when they weren’t involved in that process at all,” Wells later told me.

  But several people who have worked for Naughty Dog say Druckmann and Straley stopped seeing eye-to-eye with Hennig, and that they had fundamental disagreements on where to take the Uncharted series. When Hennig left, she signed a nondisparagement agreement with the studio that would prevent both her and Naughty Dog from making negative public comments about what had happened, according to people familiar with the arrangement. (Hennig declined to be interviewed for this book.)

  Immediately after Hennig’s departure, Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra called Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley into a meeting to tell them that she was gone. Straley felt what he later described as “a sinking feeling in my gut” as he realized what they were about to say next. “I think I said, ‘So what does this mean? Who’s heading up Uncharted 4?’” Straley said. “And that’s where [they said], kind of nervously, ‘That’s where you come in.’” After the massive critical and commercial success of The Last of Us, Druckmann and Straley were the studio’s golden boys. And now they had to make a decision: Did they want to spend the next year of their lives with Nathan Drake?

  It wasn’t an easy question to answer. The directing pair had thought they were done with Uncharted for good. Both Druckmann and Straley wanted to work on other games—they’d been playing around with prototypes for a sequel to The Last of Us—and Straley in particular was feeling burned out. “I had just worked on one of the hardest projects—the hardest project that I’d ever worked on in my life with The Last of Us,” Straley said. He wanted to spend the next few months relaxing, prototyping, and brainstorming without the stress of immutable deadlines. Moving immediately to Uncharted 4, which had been in production for over two years and was scheduled to ship just a year later, in 2015, would be like running a marathon and then hopping over to the Summer Olympics.

  But what other choice did they have?

  “Uncharted 4 needed help,” said Straley. “It was in a bad state in regards to the lines of communication, the pipeline, what people were doing. And it didn’t feel like it was making the positive forward progress it needed. . . . So how did I feel? Not great? It’s not a great position to be in, but I also believe in the Naughty Dog name. I believe in the team.” In Straley’s mind, he and Druckmann could maybe come on board for a few months, steer everyone toward a single direction, and then hop off to work on other projects, letting other design leads take the wheel once the ship was moving.

  Druckmann and Straley said they’d do it on one condition: they needed full creative control. They weren’t interested in finishing the story that Hennig had started, and while they’d try to salvage some of the characters (like Sam and Rafe) and environments (big areas in Scotland and Madagascar), they’d also have to throw out a lot of work that Uncharted 4’s team had done so far. They would need to scrap a great deal of cut scenes, voicework, and animation, which the studio had spent millions of dollars developing. They wanted to recast the major roles, which would mea
n ditching Alan Tudyk and other voice actors who had already recorded lines. Would Naughty Dog really be OK with that?

  Yes, said Wells and Balestra. Do it.

  Right away, Druckmann and Straley made a decision that they thought might court controversy: Uncharted 4 would be the last Uncharted game, or at least the last one starring Nathan Drake. The studio had been mulling this option under Hennig, but now it was official. “We looked at the previous games,” said Druckmann. “We looked at the arcs, looked at where Nathan Drake was at, what kind of stories are still left to tell, and the only one that came to our mind was the final one—how do we take him out?”

  It was a move that few other studios could pull off. What self-respecting video game publisher would put an end to a lucrative series just when it was at its peak? As it turned out, Sony would. Years of success had afforded Naughty Dog the cachet to do whatever it wanted to do, even if that meant saying goodbye to Nathan Drake for good. (Plus, Sony could always make more Uncharted games with other characters.)

  Uncharted 4 had already been in development for roughly two years. But because Straley and Druckmann were changing so much of what Hennig had done, it felt to the two directors like they were starting from scratch. “It was daunting,” said Straley. “We couldn’t take what was there, because that was part of the problem. There was a breakdown both in the gameplay and the story side of things. Both sides needed a lot of work. It was red alert, all-systems-go, panic, freak-out, ‘How the hell are we going to do this?’ mode. After being burnt out on The Last of Us, and crunching there.”

  The directing pair talked often about “feeding the beast,” a term they’d picked up from the Pixar book Creativity, Inc. that referred to a creative team’s insatiable hunger for work. With The Last of Us done, there were now nearly two hundred people working on Uncharted 4, and they all needed things to do. As soon as Straley and Druckmann took over, they had to make fast decisions. Yes, they were keeping Scotland and Madagascar. Yes, there would still be a prison flashback. The directing pair met with the leads in each department—art, design, programming, and so forth—to ensure that their teams still had work to do every day, despite the turmoil.

  “It was really stressful,” said Druckmann. “Sometimes you feel like you don’t have the proper time to consider choices, and you just have to make those choices and say, well if we get them eighty percent right, then we’ll be better off than trying to take the time to get them one hundred percent right, because meanwhile the team is just sitting idly by, waiting for that section.”

  Many at Naughty Dog were frazzled by these sudden changes, especially those who had been working on Uncharted 4 since the beginning. Although it helped to hear that Straley and Druckmann wanted to maintain as much of their work as possible, the thought of losing years’ worth of progress was nauseating to some on the staff. “Each decision was sometimes a stab in the heart,” said Jeremy Yates, a lead animator. “Awww, I can’t believe we’re cutting this thing that me or someone else had spent literally months working out. It was definitely a hard transition, but every time you do it, if you’re honest and you look back at it, then you know what, that was the right decision. This is a better game because of it. It’s more focused, more clear.”

  “The transition went relatively well [and] quickly,” said Tate Mosesian, a lead environment artist. “They had a plan, a clear plan, and they expressed it to the team. It instilled confidence. As sad as it was to see the team that had such a long history with the franchise leaving, [we could] see the future and the light at the end of the tunnel.”

  Over the next few weeks, Straley and Druckmann sat in a conference room and stared at index cards, trying to craft a new version of Uncharted 4’s story. They’d decided to keep Nathan Drake’s brother, Sam, but they wanted to make him less of a villain. Instead, he’d serve as a temptation, as the catalyst that got Nathan Drake out of domesticity and back to his treasure-hunting ways. They kept the antagonist Rafe, too, writing him as a rich, spoiled brat who was fueled by jealousy for Drake’s success. During this process, Straley and Druckmann brought in a rotation of designers and cowriters, both to help plot the story and so they’d get a feel for who could replace them as directors when they eventually left the project.

  For weeks, they’d meet in the same room, assembling index cards on a big board that became their Uncharted 4 bible. Each index card contained a story beat or scene idea—one midgame sequence, for example, was just called “epic chase”—and taken together, they told the game’s entire narrative. “One thing we’ve never done here is sat down and written down an entire script for the whole game start to front,” said Josh Scherr, a writer who sat with Straley and Druckmann for many of these meetings. “That never happens. And the reason it doesn’t happen is because game design is an iterative process, and if you do that you’re just asking for heartbreak when things inevitably change because the gameplay doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, or you have a better idea further down the line, or anything like that. You have to be able to be flexible.”

  Over the next few weeks, Druckmann and Straley put together a two-hour presentation that outlined their vision for Uncharted 4, then showed it to the rest of Naughty Dog. This was a story about addiction, they explained. At the beginning of the game, Nathan Drake would be working a standard day job and living peacefully with his longtime partner, Elena, although it would soon become clear that Drake felt unsatisfied. Sam would reemerge shortly afterward, dragging Drake into a convoluted adventure that would take them all across the world, through massive gunfights and deadly car escapes on their hunt for a treasure-filled pirate city. There would be quiet flashbacks as well as the big, explosive set pieces that fans would expect from an Uncharted game. We’d see Drake lying to Elena. We’d see Elena find out. And it would all end in Libertalia, the buried city, where Drake and crew would discover that what they thought was a pirate utopia was actually a haven of greed and paranoia.

  This would be a large game, bigger than anything Naughty Dog had done to date. And they were still hoping to release it in the fall of 2015, a year and a half away. For the developers, it was helpful to see the road map for what Uncharted 4 would ultimately look like, but the amount of work was scary. “Some people were pretty burnt out already,” said Druckmann. “They were a little afraid of how ambitious this looked. And it took a while to reinspire them to this vision.”

  It helped that E3 was coming up soon. Some game studios saw trade shows as distractions, existing only for pomp, sizzle, and marketing copy, but Naughty Dog viewed E3 as a valuable milestone. They’d usually get a prime spot at Sony’s annual press conference, and it was common for dozens of staffers to trek from Naughty Dog’s Santa Monica offices to the Los Angeles Convention Center to attend the show. Every year, Naughty Dog developers would leave E3 feeling newly energized by the reactions to whatever slick new games they were showing.

  E3 in June 2014 was no exception. At the end of the PlayStation press conference, when Sony’s president, Andrew House, came out for one final teaser and the words “Naughty Dog” appeared on-screen, fans erupted. In the teaser, a wounded Nathan Drake staggered through the jungle, as a voice-over conversation with his longtime partner Sully made it clear that this was going to be their final adventure. Then came the title: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Druckmann and Straley knew they weren’t going to kill Nathan Drake, but they sure wanted fans to think they would, which led to all sorts of fun buzzing. As Naughty Dog’s developers prepared for what they all knew would be a grueling development cycle, they scoured sites like YouTube and NeoGAF for fans’ reactions, drawing energy from the hype.

  Then they got back to work. Sony’s big new fan convention, PlayStation Experience (PSX), would take place in December 2014. To help kick off the inaugural PSX, the Naughty Dog team had agreed to put together an extensive gameplay demo for Uncharted 4, which meant they had just a few months to figure out what a slice of the final game would look like.

 
Naughty Dog, like many experienced studios, bought into the mentality that there was no way to know whether part of a game was fun until you played it. So, like other studios, they would build little “gray box” areas—self-contained spaces where all the 3-D models looked monochromatic and ugly because there was no proper art attached—and test out their design ideas to see which ones felt good to play. For designers, the upside of this prototype period is that they can experiment with new ideas without risking much time or money, though the downside is that very few of those ideas will make the cut.

  During the Amy Hennig years, the team had tinkered with all sorts of gray-box prototypes for Uncharted 4. There was a slide mechanic that would allow Drake to propel forward, Mega Man–style. There were cliff walls that Drake could shoot and then scale, using the bullet holes as handholds to climb his way up. There was a scene in an Italian auction house in which the player could switch among multiple characters, hunting for clues as Drake and crew attempted to steal an artifact without drawing suspicion from the crowd.

  At one point, during a gala in the auction house, Drake and Elena would have to dance across a fancy ballroom, maneuvering closer and closer to the artifact as the player pressed buttons along with the beat of the music, sort of like you would in a rhythm game (think Dance Dance Revolution, minus the jumping). In theory, this dancing mechanic might have been awesome, but in practice, it wasn’t really working. “When you talk about, ‘OK let’s have this fun dancing gameplay,’ it doesn’t really fit with anything else, and it has to be deep enough and fun enough by itself to exist,” said Emilia Schatz, a lead designer. “So it went by the wayside.” The team considered salvaging the dance mechanic for an early scene in which Drake and Elena are eating dinner at home—a scene that’s meant to display the state of their relationship after the past three Uncharted games—but watching them dance felt too awkward.