Crafting Uncharted 3

That's interesting. Where did you read that?

Well I'm afraid you're going to find me annoyingly tight-lipped on this subject matter. It's true we talked about a lot of different kinds of ideas in the very early stages of pre-production of Uncharted. But we've talked among ourselves about whether we should discuss that in public, and we've decided not to.

We don't want to create any kind of spoiler. Who knows what kind of game we might want to make in the future? We don't want to give away any of our great ideas we've had.

Absolutely. I would estimate we throw away 95 per cent of what we make. We don't build 100 levels and keep five of them, but we implement things over and over and over again until they're just right. That's what I mean by quoting that figure.

Of course, it's a truism at this point that game design is an iterative process. So it's very exciting to be able to show, just as a for instance, the cargo plane level, because I vividly remember when our brilliant game designer Kurt Margenau first put together this level in the game engine. He'd taken a few days just working off his own back, showing it to a few of the people around him. He made this big aeroplane that Drake could run around inside of and some boxes would slide around inside as the plane rolled and pitched, to see where the idea might go. I wouldn't like to say how many times he rebuilt that before we ended up with the level in the shipping game. It was a lot.

Just before I left the office Kurt was telling me about the insane number of people hours that have gone into this three minute sequence of gameplay. We were laughing about it.

Well, we are mad. My co-lead game designer Jacob Minkoff famously and repeatedly says we are only able to make these games because we are quite, quite mad, and we unrelentingly bite off nearly more than we can chew each time. But that's how you get to great, high quality games. You have to dream big in order to make things like Uncharted 3.

It's interesting, isn't it? It depends how you define celebrity I suppose.

Any celebrity is relative to a community of people who hold someone in high regard. Of course, the face of media has changed a lot over the last 20 years as video games have become a mature media form. Maybe not everyone at an ad agency or a Hollywood casting agency realises the cache someone like Nolan North has among the community of millions of video game players.

Well, Amy (Hennig, creative director and lead writer) told me one of the reasons she chose Nolan was it was clear to her he was interested in the process and was going to give us the amount of time we needed to do a good job in the creation of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. That's the deciding factor. It wouldn't matter who the actor was as long as they had the passion to follow through with the creation of the role. As Nolan has said it takes many, many hours to realise these performances. He worked with us on Uncharted 3 for 14-16 months. It is a big commitment of time for all of the actors who take part in the process, especially the person playing the player character.