Fortune hunter Nathan Drake is catapulted headlong into an adventure that takes him on a daring trek into the heart of the Arabian Desert in a search for the fabled 'Atlantis of the Sands.' This journey pits him and his mentor Victor Sullivan against the occult treachery of a shadowy clandestine organization and its ruthless leader. When the terrible secrets of this lost city are unearthed, Drake's quest descends into a desperate bid for survival that strains the limits of his endurance and forces him to confront his deepest fears.
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Right at the start of Chapter 9, after Nate and Cutter have their scuffle, Cutter mutters something that sounds oddly literary: 'Next you'll be standing behind me with a gun, telling me about the rabbits.' It's a direct nod to Of Mice and Men, dropped in so casually most players run straight past it without clocking the reference.
Slow down in the London pub at the very start of the game and have a look at the background props. There's a newspaper called The Overseer lying around with a headline about scientists struggling to understand a deadly fungus, a tiny throwaway prop most people never bother to actually read.
Naughty Dog's engine could only handle 580 joints per mesh, which was a problem when they needed a big, realistic-looking flood surface for one of the game's set pieces. The VFX team turned to Houdini to fracture the water simulation into smaller pieces that could actually run in-game, then stitched it all back together so it still looked like one continuous surface.
The multiplayer map Dry Docks actually started life as a rough blockmesh layout designer Junki Saita was testing out for a singleplayer level. When that level idea got dropped, the layout was too good to waste, so it got reworked into a competitive multiplayer map instead.
Whenever the crew stumbles across an actual well in Drake's Deception, Sully can't resist cracking the same dad joke, 'well, well, well.' It became such a fan favourite bit that the 2022 movie brought it back almost word for word, just handing the line to Nate instead of Sully this time round.
To tie in with the launch, Nathan Drake's own voice actor Nolan North put together a 128-page coffee table book called Drake's Journal, packed with over 500 photos from the motion capture stage. It even had QR codes printed inside that linked out to dozens of uncut mocap videos, which was a pretty novel idea for 2011.
Naughty Dog ran production more like a movie set than a typical game shoot. They had a dedicated stage at Sony Pictures Studios where actors performed motion capture and recorded dialogue at the exact same time, cast together in the room doing full rehearsals before locking in final takes.
Sony ran an actual competition where fans from the US and Europe pitched their own character for the multiplayer roster. Sixteen finalists made it through to a live audition at Sony's studios, judged by a panel that included Amy Hennig, Justin Richmond, Emily Rose and Nolan North himself.
The sequence where Nate is clinging on for dear life inside a crashing cargo plane over the desert is one of the most talked-about set pieces in the whole series, and it's basically lifted shot-for-shot into the 2022 Tom Holland movie's opening. The film swaps the ending slightly (parachute versus plunging into the ocean), but it's unmistakably the same scene.
Naughty Dog announced in June 2019 that Drake's Deception's online servers would be switched off that September, closing the book on nearly eight years of competitive and co-op multiplayer.
