Several people who have worked for Naughty Dog say Druckmann and Straley stopped seeing eye-to-eye with Hennig, and that they had fundamental disagreements on where to take the Uncharted series. Others thought it was perfectly understandable, considering how small the Uncharted 4 staff was, that the game hadn’t coalesced yet. Some who were working on Uncharted 4 wished that there was a more cohesive direction. Others say that Amy Hennig had trouble making decisions and that the nascent game wasn’t shaping up very well. Some say the Uncharted 4 team didn’t get the staff and resources it needed to survive, because The Last of Us and Left Behind had vacuumed up so much of Naughty Dog’s attention.

Eventually they’d heal their relationship and unify against the game’s real antagonist, a nasty thief named Rafe (voiced by the actor Alan Tudyk) who had served time with Sam in prison. Over the course of the story, as Nathan tried to pull away from his roots as a treasure hunter, the player would find out that he and Sam were actually brothers.

In Hennig’s version of Uncharted 4, Sam would be one of the main villains, bitter toward Nathan for leaving him to die. We hadn’t seen Sam in previous Uncharted games, because for fifteen years Nathan had thought he was dead, left behind during a Panamanian prison escape gone awry. Uncharted 4, as Hennig envisioned it, would introduce the world to Nathan Drake’s old partner, Sam. Here’s an excerpt from Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, the book by Schreier:

Still, it’s clear to those who pay attention to such things that there was some turmoil internally at Naughty Dog which eventually led to the departure of Amy Hennig, lead writer and creative director on Uncharted 1–3. Like any big production (as can be seen currently in Star Wars film land), Uncharted 4 had its ups and downs before being released to critical praise across the board and stellar sales. Jason Schreier of Kotaku fame has written a new book that documents the long development cycle of Uncharted 4 by Naughty Dog alongside other various games.

Blood sweat and pixel