This week marks the 10th anniversary of the PlayStation Vita being released in the US. As a launch game, that also means it is 10 years since gamers got to experience Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the first time. As launch games go, Uncharted: Golden Abyss was about as top tier as Vita fans could hope for. Indeed, throughout the entire lifespan of the Vita, it remained close to the top of the list of best Vita games. To celebrate the anniversary, Golden Abyss developer Bend Studio released an interview with studio head Christopher Reese who worked on the game. Here’s some of what he had to say about working on the game.
“What was your fondest memory with your time from UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss?
UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss remains to be one of my most favorite titles I have worked on. It was a turning point for future console R&D development within Sony, with the hardware teams collaboratively working directly with the game teams. This was a great experience that has ultimately led to higher quality games being produced today. As a studio and developer, we continue to help shape the future of hardware that allows us to create incredibly detailed and expansive worlds to tell rich stories in, but with that said, I do remember sitting in the audience at the PS Vita announcement in Tokyo where hardware and SDKs were close to final but still had some “issues” to iron out. One of these issues we encountered days before the announcement was a very rare to reproduce hardware crash, and we were working very closely with all the teams in Tokyo onsite to find a software solution. The clock ran out, and all of us sat there as we watched Shuhei Yoshida take the stage and show the world, for the first time, the PlayStation Vita along with a live demo of UNCHARTED that went flawlessly. It was nerve wracking but an incredible experience to watch unfold, after years of development, to see these two incredible products come together.”
Christopher Reese
Reese also said that development lessons learned on Golden Abyss have impacted how the studio works to this day.
“Game development must be agile. It is an interactive medium where we must find the fun, and you can only do that with testing ideas over and over and over until you get what is perceived to be right. With the work we did on UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss, we were always in lockstep with the prototype hardware development, which meant that we needed to be testing hardware features and performance constantly to be able to provide critical and pertinent feedback to the hardware teams to make any necessary changes. Those changes require lead times that you just don’t have to adhere to quite so rigidly when only developing from a purely software side of things, as we had been accustomed to on our previous titles. We still take many of those practices we learned from those days to our development today.”
Christopher Reese
Uncharted: Golden Abyss was, without doubt, one of the most popular Vita games. Unfortunately, the Vita struggled to find its place in the market. The Vita only managed to sell around 16 million units worldwide compared to the PSP’s 81 million. Most of the console’s sales were also in Japan, the portable console struggled significantly outside of its home country.
While many Vita fans had hoped for a Vita sequel to Golden Abyss, the console’s limited sales meant that was never a realistic prospect. While many Vita games received ports to the PS4, Golden Abyss never received that treatment. The game utilized a lot of the Vita’s exclusive features like the rear touchpad and camera. These features mean a home console port of the game is unfeasible. Anyone who wants to play the game, which is a very good entry in the series, will have to get their hands on a used PlayStation Vita.
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