“Finally, for E3, we needed a name. We put the name in the trailer. It was going to be Uncharted. We made our peace with it and said, ‘okay, this is going to be awesome.’”
However, the name hit a stumbling block, courtesy of Sony’s then executive vice-president Phil Harrison. Wells continued, “We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted], and then Phil Harrison caught wind of it, and he’s like, ‘no, we can’t name it Uncharted.’ In the UK, if you have a game that’s ‘uncharted,’ that means it didn’t do well, it didn’t crack the Top 10. So he said, ‘no, we can’t do that.’
“But we had this trailer we were showing in the press conference. He says, ‘that’s okay, just don’t put a name on it.’ We’re like, ‘uh, okay.’ We had this whole end slate ready to go. I guess we’ll put the Naughty Dog logo up there? The [trailer] ends and it just says ‘Naughty Dog,’ and we still didn’t know what to call it.”
Without a name, the gaming public started branding the project ‘Dude Raider’ due to its thematic similarities to the Tomb Raider series. Some three months after the reveal, Harrison caved and gave ‘Uncharted’ the green light.
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