Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

The project is very collaborative. We do a lot of reading and watch a lot of movies and really try to see what sort of historical events can we use as a platform for our story, because our story, although fictional, is based on real-world events.

So we were brainstorming what sort of things we could use as a platform, and one of the things that came up was Marco Polo, because he kept incredibly detailed diaries and journals of his adventures in East Asia, and there was one particular area where he didn't document what was going on, and that was what happened to the ships on his journey back to Europe - he started with 13 and came back with one.

He never explained what happened, it's a great mystery and it just kind of resonated with us in terms of where we wanted to go next.

I don't think we can tell you because there's a good chance we might use some of them in the future.

From the beginning we always wanted - I know Amy [Hennig, game director] wanted - Chloe to be a foil for showing not only what Drake could have been if was a little bit darker, but also to play off Elena, because Elena's the good girl that does the right thing all the time, and the more heroic version of what Drake could be.

But there was never that other side of Drake, which we really wanted to show in this game and it was important for Amy to show that this whole world of treasure hunters is a little seedy, and so we needed a character that was believable and funny, but a little bit darker than Drake and was going to push the boundaries on what was acceptable and what was not.

As far as what her actual backstory is: I'm not sure we can talk about that much.

Well, this game was really important for us to really delve deeper into what Drake's personality is. And one of the best ways to do that is to show what kind of personal issues he has, how he acts on those and how he reacts to other people's independent personalities.

That's part of the reason the cast of characters grew, so that we could introduce people he couldn't trust at all, or people he has to trust implicitly like Temzin who doesn't speak English, so they have to trust each other. And then how he's like with old friends and how he's like with colleagues that he has a past with but he's not sure what the future holds.

I don't think there's a limit on what the cast can be. I think we'll grow in whichever way the story goes that we're telling; if it's 100 people then it's 100 people, but I don't think it's ever going to get that big, and I don't think we're ever going to limit ourselves based on that kind of thing. It's always going to be about the story that we're trying to tell and the number of people that we can tell it with.

The big thing that we revealed in this game was that Drake tried to break into this museum before and everybody else had gotten killed. Basically, with Flynn, we wanted to hint at what their relationship was but not give it away.

Really the point was - and it's the same thing with Chloe - that we're trying to explore the darker area of Drake and that he came up from this underworld and had clearly worked in this underworld. So it's who his colleagues were at that point, and that's really what his relationship [with Flynn] is: he had a relationship with these people at time when he was doing things that were a lot more evil than we know him as.

Flynn is what Drake would have been if he'd gone another way, right? Flynn is...

About greed, about the money.