Whatever happened to the good old catchphrase? A short, pithy line from our action heroes and heroines after they’d successfully annihilated all of their enemies before considering their smoldering corpses with a t-shirt worthy rejoinder is something that appears to be lost to us as a culture.
Alas, the closest that Nathan Drake, hero of the Uncharted series has is his signature, panicked “No, no, no,” as proven by this supercut video from SuperNormalMode a/k/a Miguel Concepcion. Can that work as a t-shirt? I don’t really think so.
You know what makes Uncharted‘s Nathan Drake work? The treasure hunter – at least in the scripts – isn’t an unflappable, unstoppable killing machine. He’s very, very flappable, a tomb raiding John McClane who has a tendency to get shot – a lot. Of course, a lot of that is down to voice actor Nolan North, whose played the character in every game in the series since 2007’s Uncharted. North makes the adventurer who rocks the half-tucked shirt charming, funny, vulnerable, and a little dangerous across the four games released in the series so far.
The big question is what “No, no, no”-worthy moments will Drake come up against in the recently-announced Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (and will our hero even make it out alive?). During E3, Naughty Dog teased what could be Nathan Drake’s final adventure, one set some years after his last adventure (he’s sporting a little gray in that first teaser) and pitting the explorer against a historical conspiracy to hide a great pirate’s treasure.
And the word no no longer means anything to me.