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SONY's best-selling action series Uncharted was almost forced to change its title, Naughty Dog president Evan Wells has revealed. Speaking to IGN, Wells described how the title was all set to be revealed at E3 when SONY's then-executive vice president Phil Harrison threw a spanner in the works.

"We needed a name," Wells recalls. "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], and then 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."

Without a title, gamers began referring to the project as Dude Raider, comparing it to Lara Croft, so eventually Harrison relented and one of the last console generation's biggest hits finally got a name. The series continues in a fourth, appropriately untitled, Uncharted adventure currently in development exclusively for PlayStation 4. In the meantime Naughty Dog is busy with Left Behind, the first story-based downloadable content for its PlayStation 3 smash hit, The Last of Us.