Former Naughty Dog artist confirmed that Sam was the villain in Amy Hennig's version of Uncharted 4 – the first game demo ran on PC at 1 FPS

More than a decade after the 2016 release of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, new recollections from a former Naughty Dog developer have shed light on how different the game once looked under original director Amy Hennig.

Matt Radford, a visual effects artist who joined Naughty Dog during what he describes as a lengthy and, by some accounts, difficult development period under Hennig, told Kiwi Talkz that the version he saw contrasted sharply with the finished title released under Neil Druckmann.

Amy's version, which I saw, didn’t include the same characters.

Radford said one of the most notable changes involved Nathan Drake’s older brother, Sam. In Hennig’s iteration Sam was not a teammate but effectively a hostile presence—what Radford describes as the project’s antagonist. Hennig herself has acknowledged this direction before, telling reporters in 2019 that Sam’s antagonism was more pronounced in her script and that he functioned as “a ghost from Drake’s past,” with the story charting the brothers’ slow reconciliation.

The Uncharted 4 documentary revealed what Amy Hennig’s version could have been like

Radford also recalled the project’s earliest technical experiments, which he places around the time of Uncharted 3’s 2011 release. The team reportedly assembled a greenlight demo to convey the concept that ran on PC at roughly one frame per second, a sign of how raw the prototype was in that phase.

I remember we put together this greenlight demo for Uncharted 4, and it ran at about one frame per second on PC. The entire development at that stage felt insanely chaotic. At the same time, Hennig’s approach to the project was genuinely appealing—the vision Amy had seemed cool, honestly, it really seemed cool.

While Radford expressed appreciation for Hennig’s vision, he also praised the final game, saying Druckmann and his team delivered a satisfying conclusion to Drake’s story. Radford added, however, that Hennig’s cancelled version will likely never win the kind of community recognition he believes the developer herself deserves.