Keri Allan is back with number six, Nathan Drake of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune fame…

Ok, I’ll admit it; I’ve got a virtual crush. There’s something about Nate Drake’s cheeky smile and happy-go-lucky persona that makes him feel, well, just ‘real’. He’s like the good looking guy next door, and Drake’s Fortune felt, for me at least, like becoming part of an Indiana Jones-esque adventure.

When developer Naughty Dog first started to kick around ideas for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, they drew their inspiration from all the conventions of the pulp action-adventure genre – everything from early pulp novels and comics, to old adventure movies and Saturday-matinee serials, up to the more recent crop of adventure movies like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, and National Treasure. Maybe its just because I grew up with them, but it made me love both the main character and the game. With this in mind, I decided to ask Amy Hennig, Creative Director at Naughty Dog, how they created this modern ‘hero’.

“To really tap into this genre while keeping it contemporary, we knew that Drake needed to be an ‘everyman’ hero – a regular, ordinary guy who is extraordinary because of his willful determination, his inventiveness, and his unflagging humor in the face of adversity,” she says. “He had to be an underdog, heroic but vulnerable, always right at the limits of his ability – in other words, not a badass superhero. Now, this is isn’t a new idea in the movies, but it’s pretty unusual in games. So we knew we were taking a risk, but we deliberately set out to make him as generic-looking as we could – that’s why he’s just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. We didn’t want to put him in a costume – we wanted his personality to come through the performance, the dialogue and the animation.”

But I had to ask - for the sake of my search for the perfect man, is he based on anyone real?

“He’s really an amalgam of a bunch of different actors – for example, we wanted him to have the charm and quirky humour of Cary Grant and George Clooney, Harrison Ford’s ‘everyman’ persona, and Bruce Willis’ wit, resourcefulness and tenacity,” Amy admits. “It’s the fallibility and vulnerability of characters like Indiana Jones and John McClane that makes them so relatable – the fact that they show fear, get hurt, and make mistakes, but they persevere in the face of ridiculous odds.

“And of course, a lot of Nate’s personality comes directly from the actor who plays him, Nolan North. We worked with our cast continually for over a year, so they really got a chance to get comfortable with the characters and make them their own. This working relationship enabled us to tailor the scenes and dialogue to the actors’ personalities, as we got to know them – so in that sense, Drake wouldn’t be Drake if it weren’t for Nolan. Some of the best moments and lines in the game are things he came up with. In fact, towards the end of development I actually took a couple hours’ worth of gameplay footage into the recording studio and just had him dub over the video – so a lot of the little effort sounds, comments and comical reactions you hear during gameplay are just Nolan, improvising on the spot.”

It seems like Amy made a guy she’s happy with too, as when asked if there’s anything she dislikes about Nate, she responds: “If there was something we disliked, we would’ve changed it! Seriously, we went through a lot of iterations when designing his character model, tweaking everything – including his clothing, facial features, expressions, and hair – until we were all happy with his look. The same goes for his dialogue – we revised and rehearsed everything to get just the right performance. In the end, I think he turned out to be a very likeable character (in fact, any unlikable aspects in his personality were included intentionally, to make him a more fully-realised, complex character). We wanted him to feel like an authentic person, not a caricature – and I think that comes through in his dialogue and animation, and in Nolan’s performance.”