Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was initially mocked as “Dude Raider” for copying the Tomb Raider formula. Well, look who is on top now as the 2013 reboot of that series then copied Uncharted. Anyway the point is this series has influenced a lot of other games since it launched in 2007 for the PS3. It is still one of the best games for the system. Maybe not the best in the series, but we will get to that. 

Anyway it inspired games like that Tomb Raider reboot as well as other titles. That is to say it is an important franchise to a lot of gamers. So in celebration of its upcoming 12th anniversary, let’s go back to the beginning and learn some facts about the first Uncharted.

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10 Origins

First and foremost let’s talk about the series’ name. The reason why Naughty Dog went with Uncharted is because this was literally uncharted territory for them. Their two biggest franchises before this, Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter, were goofy platformers. They had yet to experiment with a more realistic game. In 2004 it started about as project “Big” which would then turn into Uncharted. As a bonus fact on names, Nathan Drake shares the initials with Naughty Dog, ND, which assuredly is not a coincidence.

9 Old School References

It should go without saying that Naughty Dog put in a lot references to their previous titles. Drake’s wetsuit is manufactured from the Ottsel company. An Ottsel is the creature Daxter turns into in Jak and Daxter. Another reference from that comes in the form of the hidden treasure known as the Strange Relic. This is actually a precursor orb. Finally Sully’s plane is called Hog Wild, which is the name of a Crash Bandicoot level and a hard one at that.

8 Secret Death

There is a secret death animation, which only triggers in the beginning of the game. If Nathan jumps into the water during the pirate fight, one of them will grab him from behind and pull him under for an automatic death.

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This might be a reference to the Lurker Shark, which ate players if they swam too far away from shore in the first Jak and Daxter. This may also just be a watermark on their design philosophy, but we included it on here anyway.

7 Elena’s Changes

When Elena was first conceptualized she was going to have brown hair and come from a Spanish decent. At this time the team wanted Claudia Black to play her, but after the redesign the role was then given to Emily Rose. It’s hard to imagine the role backwards now. Anyway Claudia Black would eventually get cast as Chloe in the sequel. Maybe that’s why Naughty Dog gave Chloe her own game in the form of The Lost Legacy.

6 Platinum Trophies

When the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 they introduced the world to the concept of Achievements. Even though fans demanded it for the PS3, Sony wouldn’t cave until 2009, three years after the system’s initial debut. They mandated that all games going forward from January will require Trophy support, but that games released prior to this did not require fixes. Despite that a lot of games did go back and added Trophies including Uncharted, which is the first game to have a Platinum one. Just as a timeline reference, this was two years after it first released.

5 The Shirt

Even though work had begun in 2004, it wouldn’t be revealed to the world until E3 2006. In this trailer Nathan is shown wearing a white shirt with red sleeves, which was later changed into a green T-Shirt. Here is the aforementioned trailer as well. Everything else looks pretty close to the final release besides the shirt. Naughty Dog brought back the original shirt for the third game. It’s the one young Nathan wears in the flashback segments in the beginning of the game.

4 Sales

In Uncharted’s first ten weeks it reached over a million in sales. This was huge as the PS3 was struggling for a hit in its first couple years. It was a massive hit for both Sony and Naughty Dog, which in turn helped give the sequel more backing turning it into the best entry in the franchise. Well, that is to say it is well regarded as one of the best entries. According to Metacritic it is still the highest rated one.

3 Bloodless

Here is a weird tidbit of information. When the game was released in Japan all of the blood was removed. The gunplay still remained as strong as ever, but there was no blood.

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This is strange considering that Uncharted isn’t even that blood heavy. Sure Nathan can get smeared with the red stuff, but there is no gore of any kind. We aren’t against the censorship, but we do find it odd.

2 More About Drake

Let’s talk about Nathan Drake a little more. When conceiving him Naughty Dog wanted to create an “every man” type of hero. They didn’t want a superhero, or battle hardened soldier in other words. In the first game he was thirty and he does age as the series goes on. He even gets gray hairs. Finally his biggest fear is clowns, which hey, we can’t disagree with. He must have seen It too many times as a kid. Tim Curry was a pretty freak character.

1 Aim Clipping

Let’s end this article by looking at the aim clipping glitch. Uncharted was a good proof of concept, which is to say it is good and still fun to go back to, but the sequels are all better. So it may come as no surprise that this is an incredibly buggy game. As seen in this video from A+Start, he demonstrates just how easy it is to clip through environments and speedrun through the game using shortcuts. It isn’t even that hard of a maneuver to do. Go ahead and try it sometime.

NEXT: 10 Facts And Trivia You Never Knew About The First Kingdom Hearts