He PlayStation 3 turns 20 in November and you can’t talk about the console without talking about Unexplored. Naughty Dog’s globe-trotting franchise was one of its crown jewels, and in early May, it’s celebrating two major milestones.
The first and most immediate is the tenth anniversary of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Originally released on May 10, 2016 for the PlayStation 4, the game marked Naughty Dog’s first non-remastered dive into the console and was announced at the time as the final entry in the series. It also had a notoriously problematic development, including crunch and the long time creative director and co-writer Amy Hennig and director/designer Justin Richmond both left in 2014. Their departures led to heavy rewrites, as the game makes clear reveal trailer hinting at a darker and potentially less familiar story that is not followed up in the final product.
Despite the circumstances of its existence, Unexplored 4 It was a critical and commercial favorite. As it stands, it is the best-selling entry in the series and one of the best-selling titles on PS4. More than The last of us, It could be said that this game marks the change of atmosphere at Naughty Dog: the long-time employees (and the last of us directors) Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley took over after the departures of Hennig and Richmond, with Straley departure after development finished The end of a thief. Druckmann remained at Naughty Dog, gradually becoming a more central figure and raising his profile enough to become a key creative on the last of us HBO adaptation. Far from being the first developer to rise through the ranks where he works, it’s hard not to associate Naughty Dog with him these days, which has partially backfired on the studio, as he repeatedly revised his post-apocalyptic franchise throughout the 2020s.
Going further back into the past, May 9th marked the 20th anniversary of the original creation. of unexplored debut in E3 2006. (For the first 11 years of its life, the exhibition began in May instead of June or July.) After four Jak and Daxter games for the PlayStation 2, it was a big deal to hear that Naughty Dog was leaving it behind to work on a new IP, much less one with a photorealistic style and set in the real world. Known then by the code name “Big”, the project did not take long to draw comparisons with Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, even with its focus on cover-based shooting. From that moment on, interest in the game grew with each new look.
When Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune finally released on November 19, 2007, its positive reception gave rise to a key PlayStation franchise and helped introduce cinematic films, usually third person games that exist to this day. The number of titles that lie in its shadow is too many to count, but Unexplored itself has been missing for a while. the movie finally came out in 2022, while its last installment of the game itself was the independent branch The lost legacy. Today, it is not a question of “if” we will get more Unexplored, but “when”: A 2023 PS5 announcement got fans excited with a vague tease of a woman in a caveand more recently they have been enthusiastic about instagram posts of Lost legacy director Shaun Escayg. Naughty Dog may be working on Intergalactic: the heretic prophet, but like Nathan Drake, he can’t resist exploring the past for long.
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