With Naughty Dog trying their hardest to keep The Last of Us a secret, it was a bit of a surprise to see a little teaser to the game in Uncharted 3 ahead of the game’s reveal. It turns out that Naughty Dog had actually planned to announce the game at E3, and put the Easter egg in before they missed the reveal date – only to forget all about it.
Naughty Dog’s Co-President Evan Wells told Eurogamer:
We were very serious about keeping it a secret, limiting the people that were exposed to it even internally in Sony. It never crossed our mind that putting an easter egg like that in Uncharted 3 would rat us out.
Luckily for Naughty Dog, the studio regularly helps out other developers with their projects, so most people presumed that the Easter egg was still a reference to a non-ND product.
Another time Naughty Dog feared that the game would leak was two months ago, when Neil Druckmann, the creative director and writer of The Last of Us, left his iPad on a plane – which had the debut trailer stored on it. The iPad was never found, but the trailer was never released onto the web.
One week before the VGAs, Evan Wells even emailed the entire company to not say anything on Twitter or Facebook, adding “Don’t be that guy.”
[Via]
