Nathan Drake’s Wet Pants Showed Me the Future

Entering uncharted territory.

We are on the precipice of a new generation of video game consoles. The tenth generation, if you go by the most widely acknowledged timeline (although some will argue the Switch 2 is still technically a ninth-generation system as, with most things, the Wii U creates a bit of a mess here). And while Nintendo’s new home console/handheld hybrid was never intended to be a technical showcase—instead favouring versatility as its main selling point—the gaming community is still holding its collective breath for that next-gen moment.

That exuberant exhale may be some time coming, though. Most of the talk around the Switch 2 is focused on its pricing and availability, and less on what it promises for the medium’s future. Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza have Nintendo’s storied gold-standard design written all over them, but that’s hardly a new thing at this point. We know Nintendo makes excellent video games. What can the Switch 2 deliver that we didn’t have access to before? And I’m not talking about a stats sheet with numbers next to green arrows showing how this console is x-percentage better than its predecessor.

I’m talking about a moment. A next-gen moment. A line in the sand moment. A moment that makes us all stop and go: “wow!” I’m talking about the wonder of getting to explore a sprawling Hyrule in the palm of our hands in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’m talking about the magic of swinging a Wii Remote and having that action correspond with our Mii’s baseball bat in Wii Sports. But most of all, I’m talking about Nathan Drake’s wet pants.

This is the story of my personal favourite next-gen moment. To tell this small but significant chapter in my gaming history, we must rewind a few console generations. Back to number seven, to be exact. Back to my childhood. When all that seemed to matter was whether Phineas and Ferb would, indeed, get busted. Or how long you could stay on a RipStik before inevitably falling off and scraping your elbow.

The year was 2009. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had successfully ushered high-definition gaming into the living rooms of children around the world. Just not mine. Or any of my friends’, for that matter. Understandably, our parents weren’t about to dish out hundreds of dollars for a new way for us not to do our homework in the middle of a financial crisis that, I’ve been told, was global.

I was hardly a gamer at this point, anyway. Outside of messing around on Poptropica and Neopets on my family’s boxy computer that I’m pretty sure NASA gifted to us after the 1969 moon landing, I didn’t care much for video games. We didn’t even own a PlayStation 2, and everyone owned a PlayStation 2. So, when I visited my friend’s house in the leafy streets of Auckland’s eastern suburbs one afternoon in ‘09, we did what fewer and fewer kids did in the 2000s. We went outside.

After playing with our Transformer toys on the playground and transforming that playground into Helm’s Deep, my friend offered a suggestion for what we could do next.

“Hey, Harry. Do you remember Toby¹ from our year five class?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s just moved into a new house around the corner. We should visit. I hear he’s got a PlayStation 3.”

So, we did. Toby let us in to his fancy new house where we sat on his fancy new sofa and booted up his fancy new PlayStation 3 on his fancy new flat-screen plasma television. It was my very first experience interacting with the system, even though it had already been out for a few years at this point. Here’s what immediately stood out to me about Toby’s PS3:

· The controller looked a lot like the PlayStation 2 controller but was wireless and had oddly-sloped triggers which my fingers kept slipping off.

· The system menu looked a lot like the PSP’s system menu, which my ten-year-old brain clocked as being a smart piece of branding alignment.

· You could download game demos off the internet which allowed you to play a small slice of a game for free.

One of the demos on Toby’s PS3 was for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. None of those words meant anything to me at the time. I was oblivious to the fact that the game shared the same developer as Jak 3, which we had been playing on my friend’s PS2 earlier that day. Or that, depending on when exactly in 2009 this day occurred, the game’s sequel, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, may have already released and all but locked in that year’s GOTY awards. All I knew was that the game was giving off Indiana Jones vibes, and that vibed with me.

Toby started the Uncharted demo, and I was transfixed. From the demo’s opening cutscene—which showed Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher jumping from an exploding plane—I could tell this game was operating on a different level. It’s a cliché to label Uncharted as “cinematic”, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Everything, from the writing to the voice acting to the music, felt cinematically motivated in a way I hadn’t seen in a game before.

The characters were instantly likeable, even though I knew nothing about who they were or what they were doing flying above this remote jungle. When Drake and Elena were bantering on the plane, I was immersed in their chemistry. When they got separated after the crash, I was genuinely concerned about Elena’s wellbeing. Everything about the game was funny and flirty and urgent and oh-so charming.

And it was beautiful. Seeing the jungle in Uncharted for the first time elicited the same feelings in me as when the Sistine Chapel ceiling was unveiled. Or, you know, close enough to what I’m sure those sixteenth century Italians felt. The level of detail. The dense foliage. The colours—vibrant, bold, yet earthy. Video games had mastered hyperrealism, and I was so here for it.

Toby handed me the controller just as a gun fight broke out. I was terrible at 3D camera controls back then, so it wasn’t long before all those lovely, saturated colours faded to black-and-white and Drake lay rag-dolled and dead on the jungle floor. I offered the controller back to Toby—happy to play spectator for the time being.

The area after the combat encounter featured a waterfall with a body of water pooling at its base. As with everything else in the game, the water graphics looked stunning. Clearly Toby thought the same as he made Drake make a beeline for the plunge pool. Drake rolled into the water, emerged, and my jaw dropped.

His clothes were wet. Like, actually soaked through. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. For roughly forty-five seconds. Because what Toby did next will always stay with me as a defining next-gen moment. He took Drake out of the plunge pool, ran around for a bit to let Drake’s clothes dry, then re-entered the water, but only up to waist level. When Drake next moved to dry land, his pants were wet, but his upper half was not.

At risk of hyperbole, this blew my mind. What crazy attention to detail! Only the parts of Drake’s character model that came into contact with the water were being affected. It was a commitment to realism that ironically came across as fantastical by pure virtue of it occurring in a video game. And as silly as it may sound to have a digital character’s wet pants impact me so much, I can’t deny that, to me, it was magical. It was a moment.

And with the Switch 2 kicking off a new generation of consoles, I hope people young and old continue to be wowed by the evolving technical capabilities of video games. Because on that special day at Toby’s house in ’09, the enchantment of Nathan Drake’s squidgy jeans showed me the future of gaming more than any impressive-looking stats or slick media presentations ever could.

---

The Video Game Storyteller is a free Substack written and formatted by Harry Fritsch on the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people, the Traditional Custodians of Meanjin (Brisbane).

All images were either captured directly by the author or sourced from publicly available promotional screenshots.

Want to see more from The Video Game Storyteller? Check out our TikTok channel @thevgstoryteller.

If you wish to contact Harry, you may do so by emailing him at harryfritsch98@gmail.com.

1. His name was not actually “Toby”. In fact, I can’t remember his name. Of course, this means his name may have indeed been “Toby”, making this a remarkable coincidence—in which case, I apologise for any identity doxing my deep, subconscious memories may have caused.