Uncharted‘s Treasure Hunter Masters Inter-Dimensional Theft
Nathan Drake is the greatest (male) treasure hunter in video game history. He’s stolen countless artifacts from every continent populated mostly by non-white people, the lives of thousands of NPCs, and the hearts of players everywhere. Drake’s greatest achievement, however, was stealing from an entirely different game series. And no, we’re not talking about Uncharted ripping off Tomb Raider. This is about the developers at Naughty Dog stealing beautiful artwork from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
Ubisoft
If you look carefully at the trailer for Uncharted 4, you’ll see that they not only lifted the artwork directly from the Creed of Assassins, they even removed the pirate from the picture for undisclosed reasons.
Ubisoft, Naughty Dog
Sony was quick to take down the trailer following complaints, and Naughty Dog both replaced the artwork with another piece of (hopefully) not stolen art, and this kind of thing hasn’t happened again since. But that’s not the first time that it has happened.
The Naughty devs at Naughty Dog did the same thing for The Last Of Us when they stole the most precious piece of abstract art known to man, a personal redesign of the Boston subway map, which had been done by a then-unknown artist.
Naughty Dog
Naughty Dog was once again quick to apologize, and the whole thing got settled out peacefully, which means they probably bought the guy off with a subway pass.