8-Hour Single-Player Pitch Wouldn’t Work Today, Says Uncharted Creator

Amy Hennig, creator of the Uncharted series, claimed in a recent interview that a single-player, 8-hour game pitch wouldn’t work today.

Amy Hennig, creator of the Uncharted series, claimed in a recent interview that a single-player, 8-hour game pitch wouldn’t work today.

Based on the evolution of the video games industry, she told Gameranx, the original game Drake’s Fortune wouldn’t find a publisher so easily.

“I’ve said that I don’t think a game like the first Uncharted, even though it was the foundational footprint for that series, would be a viable pitch today,” Hennig said.

“The idea of a finite eight-ish-hour experience that has no second modes, no online — the only replayability was the fact that you could unlock cheats and stuff like that. No multiplayer, nothing. That doesn’t fly anymore.

Now you have to have a lot of hours of gameplay. Eight would never cut it. Usually some sort of online mode. And of course you see where things are pushing, toward live services and battle royale and games as a service.”

Hennig had some troubles with Naughty Dog and left the studio after a few years spent on Uncharted 4, which was then passed to Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann.

Such comments also reflect her experience with Electronic Arts, which shut down Visceral Games and her Star Wars project in order to work on a licensed open world (that also got cancelled, eventually).