If you remember the story from the second installment of Uncharted, then you clearly remember the Cintamani Stone and Nathan Drake’s dangerous voyage to get his hands on it. But what if Uncharted 2 hadn’t been about the stone? New information turned up in an interview where Naughty Dog said that the second game almost became centered around finding Thor’s all-powerful and irritatingly selective hammer, Mjolnir.
During an interview with Neil Druckmann, the director for Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, GamesRadar discovered that there was more on the table than just the Cintamani Stone when it came to the second game. Druckmann said,
One we didn’t do [that] I remember discussing for Uncharted 2 was Thor's hammer. What would that mean to do Thor's Hammer? We would actually do concept art and we got pretty deep down that road.
Druckmann had mentioned that they usually start with as many concepts as they can throw on the table and narrow it down until they get to the ones they really like, saying developers brought "as many to the table as possible," and while it "hit a wall here, or lost interest" in others, the Mjolnir idea was briefly explored.
From what I have seen of game development, it’s amazing to see all of these concepts come to the table and watch them grow and morph into this living and breathing being. Despite the thrill around finding Thor’s actual mythical hammer, I’m glad the games turned out the way they did. Discovering information like this is always fascinating because it makes you step back and wonder if one little thing had been different, how would that have affected the entire series, if at all? It’s these little changes that can sometimes make big impacts. Uncharted 4 has been confirmed for a May 10 release date with plans to release DLC.
