Seventeen years on, I've been back through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves — and what makes it worth talking about as part of a month with the PlayStation 3 isn't really the question of whether it's any good. It's that this is the point where the console's fortunes turned.
Sony had spent two years trying to explain why the PS3 was worth the money. In October 2009, Naughty Dog answered the question for them.
2009, and Sony finally had an answer
Cast your mind back. Sony had spent a couple of years trying to convince everybody that the PS3 was worth its rather eye-watering asking price. The Xbox 360 had a twelve-month head start. Nintendo was selling Wiis to absolutely everybody on the planet, including people who'd never shown the slightest interest in video games. And Sony was busy telling us all we should be excited about the Cell processor.
Then things started to shift. The Slim had arrived, the price had come down, and Sony's first-party studios were finally showing what the machine could actually do. Right at the forefront of that was Naughty Dog — not newcomers by any means, having already given us Crash Bandicoot on the original PlayStation and Jak and Daxter on the PS2, before introducing us to Nathan Drake in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune in 2007. That was a cracking first attempt at a new franchise with a really likeable hero, spectacular locations and more than a passing resemblance to Indiana Jones. It just wasn't the finished article.
Two years later they came back and absolutely nailed it. Uncharted 2 launched in October 2009, sending Drake globetrotting after the Cintamani Stone and the lost city of Shambhala, via ancient temples, double-crosses, collapsing buildings and enough near-death experiences to make you wonder why he'd never considered a slightly quieter career in accountancy.
Naughty Dog blurred the line between watching a Hollywood blockbuster and taking part in one — on a console developers had spent years telling us was notoriously difficult to work with.
The critics noticed. It sits at 96 on Metacritic, and it picked up more than two hundred game of the year awards — part of a haul of over three hundred industry awards in total. Not just one of the best-reviewed PS3 games, but one of the best-reviewed games of the entire generation. Alongside the likes of Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2 and later God of War III, it helped establish the PS3 as a console with a genuinely formidable exclusive library. While Microsoft had Halo and Gears of War, Sony was building a reputation for lavish, cinematic, story-driven adventures — a reputation Naughty Dog went on to strengthen with Uncharted 3, The Last of Us and everything that followed. You can trace a lot of modern PlayStation's identity straight back to this.
Did Uncharted 2 save the PS3 single-handed? Of course not. The Slim, the price cuts, Blu-ray, the other exclusives — they all played their part. But if you wanted one game that showed how far the machine had come since that painful launch, you'd struggle to do better.
That opening still gets me
The train sequence, with Drake dangling over the edge of a cliff, remains one of the most memorable introductions to a game I've ever played. The extraordinary thing is that it isn't just a cutscene — you play it. If I think of Uncharted, that's the bit I go to.
Playing it again, a few things stood out. The visuals are genuinely impressive for a seventeen-year-old game; Naughty Dog were very, very good at squeezing fabulous-looking games out of that hardware. The controls are easy to get a handle on and it eases you in gently without ever making you feel like you've stopped playing. And it's one of those games you can simply watch someone else play — there's enough action, with a bit of puzzle-solving here and there, that you don't need the pad in your hands to enjoy it. Which, incidentally, makes it an absolute nightmare to demonstrate in a short format like this. It's long, it's heavily cinematic, and you don't really get into the meat of it until later.
Yes, there are Lara Croft vibes about it, and yes, the treasure-hunter thing has been done plenty of times before. I don't care. It's why the Tomb Raider games are so good and it's why this one is so good. And it doesn't bother me that it's a little bit on rails — you really are in an interactive movie, so that works.
One reservation, and it isn't about the game
The Uncharted film. I'm sure there are plenty of Tom Holland fans out there, and he's great as Spider-Man, but I just don't think he was the right casting for Nathan Drake — nor, for my money, was Mark Wahlberg as Sully. It could have done so much more.
As for the series itself: I've played them all bar the handheld one — Golden Abyss, which launched alongside the Vita and was made by Sony Bend rather than Naughty Dog. I'd put two and four as my favourites, with one and three not far behind. If you've never played Uncharted 2, go and play it. The presentation, the soundtrack, the story — everything about it is polished to a shine, and it showed exactly what the PlayStation 3 was capable of. For a lot of people, it was reason enough to buy one.
Which, after last week's game, is quite the gear change.