During interviews conducted for IGN’s extensive History of Naughty Dog , Naughty Dog’s Co-President Evan Wells revealed an interesting story regarding the development of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune , one specifically surrounding its title.

“ We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted]. And then Phil Harrison caught wind of it, and he’s like, ‘no, we can’t name it Uncharted.’

Uncharted was almost named something else.

“ That’s when the ‘Dude Raider’ thing started coming up.

At Sony’s now-infamous E3 2006 press conference – the one where the company revealed PlayStation 3’s exorbitant $600 price tag – Naughty Dog’s new, much-anticipated project was set to be revealed. After working on cartoony, mascot-driven platformers for the past decade, Naughty Dog was ready to unveil its fresh, realistic new series: Uncharted.“The funny story behind [this] is, we put together this trailer for E3 to announce our game,” Wells said. “But we didn’t have a name yet. We had no idea what we were going to call it. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas. ‘Uncharted,’ actually, was on the table for a while. We went away from it.”“Finally, for E3, we needed a name,” he continued. “We put the name in the trailer. It was going to be Uncharted. We made our peace with it and said, ‘okay, this is going to be awesome.’”“We were all ready to go out with [Uncharted],” Wells explained. “And then [former PlayStation Executive Vice-President and current Microsoft Corporate Vice-President] Phil Harrison caught wind of it, and he’s like, ‘no, we can’t name it Uncharted.’ In the UK, if you have a game that’s ‘uncharted,’ that means it didn’t do well, it didn’t crack the Top 10. So he said, ‘no, we can’t do that.’”“But we had this trailer we were showing in the press conference. He says, ‘that’s okay, just don’t put a name on it.’ We’re like, ‘uh, okay.’ We had this whole end slate ready to go. I guess we’ll put the Naughty Dog logo up there? The [trailer] ends and it just says ‘Naughty Dog,’ and we still didn’t know what to call it.”The History of Naughty Dog: Part IV – which covers the development of Uncharted, as well as Naughty Dog’s aborted PSP game and its initial failed attempt to split into two teams – is coming to IGN soon. In the meantime, catch up on the previous three parts: Part I: The Early Years Part II: Crash Bandicoot , and Part III: Jak & Daxter

Colin Moriarty is IGN’s Senior Editor. You can follow him on Twitter.