Uncharted

Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells revealed in an interview with IGN this week an interesting fact about one of their biggest series, Uncharted.

It very nearly wasn't called Uncharted at all:

"We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted]," Wells explained. "And then [former PlayStation Executive Vice-President and current Microsoft Corporate Vice-President] 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.'"

For a while, the team used the name the Internet had given their game: Dude Raider. The similarities to Tomb Raider are hard to miss, after all. The story has a happy ending, as we all know now. A few months later, Harrison gave the team the go-ahead to use the original Uncharted title.

Wells hints in the interview that there may have been other names on the table, saying that for a while Uncharted had been left behind before they went back to it, but unfortunately he doesn't hint at what other titles may have been. Grave Robber? Crypt Invader? Undiscovered? Unmapped? Or maybe The Adventures of Half-Tuck. Sadly, we'll never know.