"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory."
—Sir Francis Drake, 1587 (opening quote)
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is the first game in Naughty Dog's Uncharted series. It was originally released on November 19, 2007 for the PlayStation 3.
Professional treasure hunter Nathan Drake, an alleged descendant of the explorer Sir Francis Drake, along with his old friend and mentor, Victor "Sully" Sullivan, and Elena Fisher, a photojournalist whose employer he has tricked into financing his expedition under false pretences, explores an abandoned island in the belief that Francis Drake faked his death in order to hide the vast fortunes of El Dorado. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that gang of pirates and mercenaries has also set their sights on the treasure.
The game is followed by Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
This game provides examples of:
- Action Commands: Far more than in the rest of the series. The team at Naughty Dog have said that one of their goals with the second game was to move past this trope and give players more control over situations that are normally relegated to cutscenes. This makes the already amazing experience that much better.
- Action Prologue: The game opens with pirates attacking Nate and Elena on their boat.
- Already Undone for You: Drake's Fortune is infamous for this. Drake has the journal of Sir Francis Drake, the "only way" to solve puzzles to open doors in the ruins. The minute you go into said doors, there are heavily armed mooks already in the room waiting in ambush.
- Artistic License – History: Combined with a little bit of Gratuitous Spanish. Nate realizes that El Dorado refers to the statue, not a city, when pointing out that "El Dorado" means "the golden man". It means "the gilded one", and the real El Dorado was a tribal chief
who covered himself in gold dust. - Back-to-Back Badasses: Drake and Eddy, when they're forced to team up against the Descendants.
- Badass in Distress: Elena breaks Nate out of prison after he's captured by pirates. In his defense, he was captured while in the process of protecting Elena.
- Bait-and-Switch Boss: In Chapter 17, Nate enters a large room containing lots of weapons and ammo, before Eddy appears. Then Nate and Eddy are both ambushed by Descendants.
- Big Bad: Gabriel Roman, the Loan Shark to whom Sully owes money and who intends on obtaining El Dorado by any means necessary. He is later supplanted by Navarro, who goes on to become the Final Boss.
- Black Eyes of Crazy: Those who are infected by the El Dorado virus immediately develop pitch black sclera and dark spots around the eyelids. The infectee will also be reduced to a feral state, becoming highly aggressive, losing the ability to speak and gradualy reverting to a quadrupedal stance.
- Bloodstained Glass Windows: Twice near the end of the game, to show how grizzly the Descendants' kills are without actually showing you.
- Body Horror: When the virus kept inside the statue of El Dorado makes contact with someone, it instantly turns them into a mutant with pitch black eyes.
- Book Ends: The game starts and ends on a boat.
- Bottomless Magazines: As is the case in many video games, all machine gun turrets have infinite ammo. Also, Elena has infinite ammo and never needs to reload when she uses a weapon while riding behind Nate in the Jet-Ski sections of the game.
- Car Chase Shoot-Out: Drake and Elena managed to get their hands on the map the bad guys had and make a run for it after Elena busts Drake from a prison. Prompting a chase through the jungle with Eddy's goons on their tail and Drake to fend them off while Elena drives.
- Chekhov's Gun: Nate gave Sully Francis Drake's diary at the start of chapter 3 for safe keeping. It is also what saves his life after he is shot by Roman.
- Disney Death: Sully is seemingly killed by the bad guys early in the game but later shows just fine. It turns out the diary he kept in his breast pocket had blocked the bullet.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Drake's Fortune is not a globe-trotting adventure like its successors, with almost the entire game taking place around the coast of Panama where El Dorado is located.
- The dynamic between Nathan and Sully is not fully formed yet, here more like business partners and friends as opposed to Sully's more recognizable Parental Substitute role; Sully's Disney Death early on is handled relatively calmly by Nate, a much different reaction from how he would respond in a similar scenario later in the series. Furthermore, when Nate does discover Sully is alive and working with Roman (implying he's turned traitor) he is reluctant to believe Sully could be a backstabber but nonetheless confronts him about this after rescuing him, something that seems out of place given their characterization in the sequels.
- Nathan is also more of a devil-may-care wisecracker in the opening levels of the game, though after Sully's apparent death and the escalating danger of the hunt he does start to wonder whether pushing on is worth it. The sequels are more consistent in portraying him as cautious and circumspect from the outset, and his voice is pitched a little higher here than in the rest of the series.
- Elena herself is a much more gung-ho and reckless character here than she would be later on. After crash-landing on the island, she heads straight for the Spanish fortress without bothering to regroup with Nate, forcing him to fight through hordes of pirates until he can find her. Later on, it's Nate who decides to abandon the quest so that they can both make it out alive, while Elena tries to goad him into continuing, and it's only when she discovers that Sully's alive that Nate is convinced to carry on. From Uncharted 2: Among Thieves onwards, the dynamic was reversed, with Elena's more recognizable characterization as the voice of reason who pushed back against Nate's recklessness being established and serving as the basis of their development in further games.
- This is the only game that does not feature Nathan's personal journal. Instead, Nate relies solely on Francis Drake's journal and map to figure out the game's puzzles. Later games would integrate all historical maps and letters into Nate's journal, which can be flipped through at will. This is not possible with Francis Drake's journal, where you can only inspect the page relevant to the puzzle at hand.
- The gameplay is much more akin to Gears of War than the subsequent Uncharted entries, and mostly consists of taking on large groups of enemies, with adventure and exploration segments occasionally breaking up the action sequences. The subsequent games in the series gave much more equal prominence to the two gameplay types, eventually tilting towards the adventure style as it progressed. The stealth mechanics that appeared in the next game are also entirely absent here, and killing any enemy, regardless of how you do it, will instantly alert every other enemy in the area to your presence (not that there are many instances where just entering a new area doesn't immediately do that, anyway).
- The melee combat mechanics consisted of a combo system (an easier Fast-and-Furious combo and a harder Brutal combo) and no evasion or blocking mechanics; either your combo succeeded in defeating the enemy, or you took damage from their counterattack. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves would completely revamp the system and serve as the foundation for melee combat throughout the rest of the series.
- Gunplay also has some minor differences, such as there being no option to adjust the zoom of a weapon, and SIXAXIS-based grenade controls. The PlayStation 4 remaster would remove the latter feature and remap grenades to the analog stick.
- Whenever a piece of treasure is collected, the game goes to the treasure menu to show you what you got. Later games simply shows the artifact to the side without pausing the game. Golden Abyss However brings this back.
- This is the only mainline Uncharted title to have absolutely no multiplayer component.
- Later levels of the game take strong cues from the Survival Horror genre, with Nate being isolated in dark, claustrophobic areas and being hunted down by zombie-like enemies known as The Descendants. No other game has replicated this aesthetic since, though they have taken their own approach to incorporating horror elements.
- Exploding Barrels: All throughout the game, but especially in the speedboat sections.
- Extremely Short Time Span: Once Nate and Elena arrive on the island the rest of the story takes place within the course of one day, starting at dawn and ending just before the sun sets.
- Foreshadowing: The existence of the Descendants was foreshadowed throughout the entire game.
- Aside from Eddy mentioning that his men are being killed by an unknown presence, Nate found several spike traps around the island and deduced something with two toes had been chewing on the victim. Upon discovering one of the traps, Nate realizes that the area he is had become quiet and believes that he and Elena are being watched, with the camera shifting to the mysterious stalker's POV.
- When Nate finds the remains of the U-Boat captain, he notes that he's been "ripped to shreds" and wonders what could have caused that.
- At the beginning of the game, Sully finds carvings of what appear to be deformed humans bowing before El Dorado (or where it used to be, anyway).
- Genre Shift: In Chapter 17, the game becomes partially survival-horror, thanks to the poorly-lit Nazi base full of ravenous, psychotic descendants of the Spaniards and Nazis that stumbled upon El Dorado, with a creepy soundtrack and a significant difficulty to boot. This lasts until Chapter 19.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Indonesian, as can be seen here and here. Worth nothing that the translation is not quite perfect, no real Indonesian talks like that.
- Hand Wave: Early on, Nate and Sully find the remains of a Nazi U-Boat resting at bottom of a waterfall. Sully comments that it must have come up the river during the rainy season and gotten stuck. Considering the geography of the area and the size of the river this is... unlikely, but neither Nate nor Sully dwells on the details.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Navarro's plan is to take the gold statue and use its mutating effect as a weapon to be sold to the highest bidder, but he is killed by the statue when it is pushed off the ship and a rope attached to it gets tangled around his leg, dragging him to the bottom of the ocean with it.
- Hollywood Density: Nate guesses that the statue is on the island when he sees an object in a log weighing the equivalent of about five hundred pounds. That's about half a cubic foot of gold, while the statue is around ten feet high, three feet thick, and three feet wide, sticking its weight at about 54 tons or 35 tons, accounting for the coffin-sized space inside.
- Instant Illness: In chapter 21, it's shown that the El Dorado virus mutates the host in a matter of seconds. Roman is shown inhaling the dust inside the sarcophagus, coughing profusely and transforming into a screeching, rabid monster in the span of a single cutscene.
- Island of Mystery: Versteckte Insel, the remote tropical island most of the game takes place in. It's filled with lush jungles all over, and most of the locations you visit on the island include a fortress, a flooded Spanish city, a customs house, a monastery, and a hidden Nazi bunker crawling with Descendants.
- It Has Been an Honor: Spoofed when Drake and Eddy are surrounded by the Descendants:Eddy: Drake... If we don't make it out of here, I just want you to know... I hate your guts!
Nathan: Yeah, likewise, pal! - It's Quiet… Too Quiet: After discovering a spike trap, Nate discovers that it has suddenly become quiet and realizes that he and Elena are being watched by whatever that had been eating the victim of the trap. After a while, he decides to dismiss it though the camera earlier had switched to the POV of whoever that has been stalking them.Nathan: Do you hear that?
Elena: Hear what?
Nathan: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. - Mêlée à Trois: In chapters 19 through 21, there is a three-way war between Nathan, Roman's forces and the feral descendants. The player must traverse the levels shooting down enemies from the two factions, but both opposing forces will also be fighting against each other.
- Misplaced Wildlife: On the remote island that Nate visits after the U-boat, the Red-whiskered bulbul, a bird native to southern Asia and introduced to several other locations- none of which include South America- is heard whistling in the background.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Walking through the Nazi base just KNOWING that there might be zombies around the corner is way scarier than actually fighting them.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Descendants are created when normal humans are exposed to The Virus contained inside El Dorado. The ones that Nathan fights throughout the game are the result of centuries of inbreeding from the infected Spaniards, with the mutations caused by the pathogen being transmitted across generations.
- Pocket Protector: How Sully survives his Disney Death, thanks to Francis' diary. Nate lampshades it by holding up the diary, staring at the bullet hole and remarking that he thought it only happened in the movies.
- Press X to Not Die: More apparent here than in later games. Some sequences require you to press or mash buttons to avoid dying, and even the Final Boss Navarro runs on this mechanic.
- Rustproof Blood: Averted in the U-Boat sequence in Chapter 3. Notable, as this trope is near-universal in video games.
- Survival Horror: Chapters 17-19 play much like this, as they revolve around traversing dark, confined corridors while being stalked by the feral Descendants.
- Take That!: The unlockable bonus content allows you to see making of videos, one that tells the story of Naughty Dog wanting to create a good looking PS3 game, one that didn't have a gross, dark, gritty filter that bogs down the art, other featurettes, reskins, and a setting that turns the screen "black and white", "sepia", and "Next Gen". Adding the "Next Gen" effect, produces a gross, dark, gritty filter that bogs down the art.
- Tempting Fate: Eddy Raja manages to capture Nathan at the end of Chapter 6. While Nathan's in Eddy's cell, Elena sneaks up to the window and tells him she's about to rescue him. She puts her plan into action while Eddy and Nathan discus what they're going to do. Eddy concludes the discussion by telling Nathan his men will find Elena and asking "How much trouble can one girl be?" Cue Elena tearing out the wall of the cell with her Jeep.
- Tropical Island Adventure: The majority of the game takes place on a tropical island in the South Pacific near Peru called Versteckte Insel.
- The Virus: El Dorado, the MacGuffin of the game, is a giant golden statue which turns out to be a golden sarcophagus containing a dessicated mummy — which carries a plague that turns all it infects into zombies. The Spanish colony on the island was overrun by the zombie plague, and Sir Francis Drake made a Heroic Sacrifice to flood the city and destroy the boats hoping to prevent the plague from spreading. The Nazis later discovered the island, the sarcophagus, and thus the Virus, which converts them as well. Roman is also infected when he opens the sarcophagus.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: Eddy lampshades this, and seemed genuinely upset and concerned about his men's wellbeing as they were being killed off by Drake and the descendants.
- You Get What You Pay For: In Chapter 14, after having a discussion with Eddy Raja, Gabriel Roman has this to say:Roman: Remind me again why we hired this superstitious idiot?
Navarro: You wanted someone cheap.
Roman: Ah, yes. Well, you get what you pay for, I suppose. - You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Navarro shoots Roman after they locate El Dorado.
- Zombie Apocalypse: What took out the Spanish colony and Nazi base on the island, and what Nathan is trying to prevent at the end.
