Naughty Dog considered new Jak & Daxter before The Last Of Us

Posted February 6, 2012 by James Pickard in News.

Ideas for a new Jak & Daxter title were being discussed at Naughty Dog before the team decided to work on The Last of Us, as they felt the game would “do everyone a disservice”.

Ah, so close, but so far. The big reveal from Naughty Dog at last year’s VGAs could have been for a new Jak & Daxter game, as the developer’s newly established second team was exploring the possibility of a return to the platforming duo before settling on new IP, The Last of Us.

“We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘Where’s the next Jak & Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively,” said Naughty Dog co-president, Evan Wells, in an interview with GameInformer (via VG247).

“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.’ It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we’d like to somehow honour.”

But it was not to be, sadly.

“Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction.”

And that’s what led the developer to The Last Of Us, a post-apocalyptic, non-zombie game, in which a different pair – Joel and Ellie – must survive a journey across the US. What little else we know about The Last of Us you can read here at BeefJack.

As for the boy Jak and his ottsel buddy Daxter, though? We still live in hope.

“Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future, so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy. But right now, we’ve got this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting,” said Wells.

“I guess there’s a possibility the Uncharted team could move on to Jak & Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

Nevertheless, nothing is stopping you reliving the game’s original three titles in glorious HD when the Jak & Daxter Trilogy is released on PS3 on February 24th.

Tagged as Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog, the last of us, Uncharted