The Naughty Dog team making The Last of Us very nearly made a new PS3 Jak & Daxter game, the developer has revealed.
But in the end it was decided such a project would “do everybody a disservice” – both fans of the series and the creators at Naughty Dog.
“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,” Naughty Dog co-founder Evan Wells told GameInformer (via VG247).
“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Let’s 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.”
He added: “Even if we felt like we were 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.”
Thus, The Last of Us.
Jak & Daxter isn’t necessarily binned for ever more; Naughty Dog is a prospering studio and Wells believes his company has “a long future”. To say never, therefore, would be “kind of crazy”, as Wells put it.
And while there’s “a possibility” the Uncharted team could do the honours, Wells believes they’d run into “all of the same problems” The Last of Us team did.
The silver lining is a remastered Jak & Daxter Collection for PS3 that will be released at the end of the month. This bundles tarted up HD versions of Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3.
Published: Feb 6, 2012 12:00 am