Amy Hennig had a plan for Uncharted 4, and it's still hard for some people to accept they'll never quite know what it was. Over 10 years later, we at least have enough scattered details from former Naughty Dog developers and self-appointed fan detectives to help us form a compelling, although incomplete, picture.
The latest insight on Amy Hennig's Uncharted 4 comes from ex-Naughty Dog visual effects artist Matt Radford, who joined the studio during Hennig's apparently tortured production of the roguish adventure. He tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview available to Insider Gaming App Premium Plus subscribers that he remembers Hennig's game as "very different, very different" from what The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann ultimately helped ship in 2016.
"Amy's vision for the game that I saw didn't have the same characters," says Radford, explaining that protagonist Nathan Drake's older, thieving brother "Sam was the villain." We've heard this before, with Hennig herself saying in 2019 that, "There was an antagonistic element to Sam in the final version of [Uncharted 4], but it wasn't right there from the outset. So we kind of, in my story, it was a little bit more of the journey from this ghost from Drake's past being an antagonist to sort of reconciliation and reunification."
"The DNA and the core story were all there," Hennig said about Uncharted 4. "The major differences had to do with like, I was introducing the idea of Sam as the brother. But my take on it was sort of different, that it was a little bit more – I mean I wouldn't call him the antagonist in the classic sense, but it was an antagonistic force in Drake's life that he then had to reconcile."
Earlier this year, an Uncharted 4: A Thief's End dataminer Michael Kemp cleaned up some evidence of what this alternate version of the game would have looked like. Kemp, or Thekempy on YouTube, had exhumed scenes of what he said "didn't seem to be related to anything I recognized. References to levels that didn't exist, things in the story that didn't happen." There was more shipwreck exploring with Nathan's wife Elena and less gun violence. Sounds like a good day to me.
Radford recalls about the early days of Uncharted 4, which began production some time around Uncharted 3 released in 2011, "I remember we built this green light demo for Uncharted 4 and it ran at like one FPS on like a PC." He thought the game "was just like crazy scrappy back then."
"And Amy's vision seemed cool,” he added. "Like, to be honest, it seemed cool." But the visual effects artist is ultimately happy with the definitive, Druckmann version of the game, which might never enjoy the same social cachet as Amy Hennig's unreleased Uncharted 4. It was nonetheless a strong entry in a strong adventure series.
Now, Radford says, "I just want to see Amy have her comeback." He says – over 10 years later from what could have been – "You know, when are we going to get Amy's games? She's really talented." Hennig is currently working on the delayed Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra after coming up with the story concept for Forspoken, Square Enix's tedious 2023 action-RPG. But while Hennig is still trying to rebuild her name in the gaming industry, many Uncharted 4 fans just want to rebuild her game.
