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Modern games reimagined as old games: Uncharted

Features
By Justin Towell published 4 October 2011

Nathan Drake as a real 8-bit hero

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Welcome to the second of our week-long retro reimaginings of modern games. After yesterday's video of God of War with 'Kratos the Angry Spartan' shouting something about his 'reven', today it's the turn of Uncharted, where Nathan Drake becomes 'Drake The Brave Explorer'. This is what you would have seen if you switched on a Game Boy in 1989 and loaded up Naughty Dog's sensational (and sadly completely fictitious) launch title.

The images here are 144x100 pixels, to recreate Game Boy's beautiful Dot Matrix display as accurately as possible. The logos are all run though a four-colour filter (then tidied up a bit by hand), although I've left some artifacts in which would have come from logos being scanned into the Game Boy's software.

Music-wise, I first tried running the actual Uncharted Theme through the 8-bit filter on a 3DS. It almost worked, but not quite. So then I tried recording the main theme on my iPad and running that through the 3DS, but even that sounded crap. So I used the Arcade synth in Garageband, turned off the reverb and made it from scratch. I think the arpeggios are pretty faithful to Game Boy soundtracks.

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We're moving through the timeline of old consoles, which means next up is a 16-bit reimagining of one of the biggest games of the moment. See you tomorrow...

04 Oct, 2011

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TOPICS
Sony
CATEGORIES
PlayStation Platforms
PRODUCTS
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception Uncharted: Golden Abyss
Justin Towell
Justin Towell
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Freelance Writer

Justin was a GamesRadar+ staffer for 10 years but is now a freelance writer, musician and videographer. He's big on retro, Sega and racing games (especially retro Sega racing games) and currently also writes for Play Magazine, Traxion.gg, PC Gamer and TopTenReviews, as well as running his own YouTube channel. Having learned to love all platforms equally after Sega left the hardware industry (sniff), his favourite games include Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, Zelda BotW, Sea of Thieves, Sega Rally Championship and Treasure Island Dizzy.

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