Naughty Dog on Making Nathan Drake a ‘Fallible Hero’

Naughty Dog’s Richard Lemarch has spilled the beans on the design influences behind Uncharted hero Nathan Drake, revealing the studio wanted the brash treasure hunter to resemble a regular bloke as opposed to an individual who boasted “precise Ninja powers”. As a result of this, the developer poured over various action movies staring ‘everyday’ heroes when tweaking Drake’s character for the hotly anticipated sequel.

“We took new directions in our approach to storytelling. It led us to take an approach that was different from what most games take,” said Lemarch, during an interview with VentureBeat. “As a character, Nathan Drake is quite different from other video game characters. He is recognizable as a regular guy. That was important for us. We wanted him to be a fallible hero — that was common as a thread in all of the pulp fiction we looked at. Our research for the original Uncharted took us all the way back to the beginnings of adventure storytelling.”

“We looked at Robert Louis Stevenson and Robinson Crusoe. We zeroed in on early 20th century stories like Doc Savage, who was a finely honed physical specimen. That led us to heroes like Tintin. There you get more color in the characters, and more globetrotting in the stories. We looked at John Mclane from Die Hard.

“They’re not highly physically trained, but more regular guys who fight in a sloppy way. They don’t have precise Ninja powers.”

[Via: VentureBeat]