Amy Hennig Opens Up About Working On Uncharted, And Leaving EA

At the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada last week, Amy Hennig, former director of the Uncharted and Legacy of Kain series, sat down with US Gamer for an interview, in which she talked about her career, and legacy in the industry.

As explained by Hennig, the decision to create Uncharted was not spontaneous, but grew from a gradual idea. When she first joined Naughty Dog, the team was already kicking around some ideas for games they would like to bring to the PlayStation 3. She then joined in their conversation and while Hennig could not remember what exactly went on, but she remembers the team going “yes” to each other.

“We got to a place where we realized everyone else was kind of going a little grim and apocalyptic, and that certainly wasn’t Naughty Dog’s DNA anyway, right? We already knew that. You know, we really should be pushing more towards sort of like colourful, and energy, and optimism somewhat,” Hennig explains.

Hennig goes on to state that she has never really experienced misogyny whilst working in an industry infamously dominated by males. She attributed that to her obliviousness which she calls her “tool or technique” to surviving in the industry, and that she just doesn’t “think about it”.

“It’s harder for people then to get purchase because you don’t engage, you’re already just kind of barreling through.”

What she felt was the harder part of her career was not actually the misogyny but getting people to understand what they wanted to do with Uncharted.

“I mean now it doesn’t seem like such a weird pitch, but the idea of just doing this dude in a t-shirt and jeans and, you know, unremarkable is not a mascot character. And people had a lot of trouble with that at first,” Hennig elaborates. “That it wasn’t iconic enough or whatever. But my feeling was, well, you know, having an actor on a movie poster wearing a t-shirt and jeans is fine, but we can’t do that?”

Of course, when you are trying to come up with a contemporary Indiana Jones, he will need to embody the qualities of Harrison Ford in those movies. The character will need to be flawed and vulnerable, he needed to stumble when running around, and know to flinch from oncoming bullets. So that is why, according to Hennig, the main character for Uncharted cannot be put in a costume but instead “needs to be in a t-shirt and jeans”.

During the interview with US Gamer, Hennig was also asked for her thoughts on her experience around when she decided to leave Electronic Arts (EA), to which she replied honestly that it was a “challenging time”.

“I don’t know how public it was, but I mean we went through a studio reboot and, you know, had some reorgs, and layoffs, and the studio was entirely devoted, except for like just a handful of us at the beginning, to working on Battlefield Hardline and then the DLC for Battlefield Hardline. So it was very hard to get to a point where we felt like we had the foundation we needed, the team size we needed, all the right disciplines we needed, until sort of late in the process. It wasn’t like we were starting like right out the gun from when I started in April [2014]; it was very delayed.”

Hennig mentioned how though at that time Visceral seemed like it was beset with a lot of challenges, at least it was making a game – the now-cancelled Star Wars project, codenamed ‘Ragtag’ which some people have even taken to calling it an ‘Uncharted Star Wars.’

Due to the game not aligning with EA’s business plan, ‘Ragtag’ was ultimately cancelled midway through production and Hennig says that, “It’s tough when you spend a lot of time doing foundational stuff but then don’t get to go ta-da! [laughs] You know, here’s the game.”

Since leaving EA in June last year, Hennig says that she has been “consulting and just sort of doing research, and refuelling the tank, and having lots of meetings to kind of see what’s going on out there.”

She has also set up her own little independent studio, and is currently looking into doing “a lot of VR stuff”.