Videogame remakes are become more common in the industry and while the prospect of having modernized versions of timeless classics that look and play better than the originals are almost irresistible, not every developer is in favor of them. For example, Benson Russell, developer for two of the original Uncharted games and a current designer at Naughty Dog, doesn’t believe a remake of Drake’s Fortune, the first title in the Uncharted series, would be sensible, or even necessary.
In a recent conversation with FRVR, he has explained why he’s not particularly thrilled for the possibility of a remake of the first Uncharted game, Drake’s Fortune.
“Uncharted as a thing is still in the zeitgeist,” he said, “System Shock… a remake of that now makes a lot of sense, because not just can you play it, but it had horrible key bindings, it kept a lot of people out of it from wanting to play it. There’s already a version [of Drake’s Fortune] you can play on modern consoles [to] get the experience. What’s the point of remastering [or remaking] it?”
“I just don’t see the point of remaking [it],” he continued. “You’d have to rewrite the whole story to make it better, which means you’re going to change the spirit and you’re going to change the scenes and what the first one was about, right? You’re going to have to add all these scenes or take things away and a lot of the key set pieces — are you going to keep those? Are you going to have to redo them because they don’t fit your story? It doesn’t make any sense [to remake it]. I honestly thought the same thing about The Last of Us Part 1… these are old games for a reason.”
The dev concluded by saying that remaking Drake’s Fortune at this point in time would inevitably feel “more like a cash grab than it would feel like anything necessary at this point”.
Naughty Dog’s upcoming title is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet which has been in development for over four years and features a star studded cast of Tati Gabrielle from the Uncharted movie as protagonist Jordan A. Mun, and Kumail Nanjiani of Marvel’s Eternals as another in-game character called Colin Graves. The game is not expected to release till 2027 at the earliest.
