Naughty Dog has revealed that a new Jak and Daxter game was almost made instead of The Last of Us. Following Uncharted 2, Naughty Dog split into two teams and got ready to move onto its next game. That game was originally planned to be the next Jak and Daxter, but the team ran into trouble while attempting to design the game.
"We dug around trying to find the core of Jak and Daxter," The Last of Us creative director Neil Druckmann told Game Informer. "Who are the characters? We had to reboot it essentially. Every time we got excited about an idea we'd take a step back and look at it and be like 'It's not Jak and Daxter, are we just slapping the name on it for marketing reasons?'"
"It started feeling like a compromise," Druckmann added. "The more we tried to make Jak and Daxter like we wanted to, it didn't feel like things were matching up. We have folders and folders filled with scrapped ideas."
"All the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak and Daxter Jak and Daxter," added studio co-founder Evan Wells. "Even though we wanted to give fans another Jak and Daxter, we felt we weren't going to give them the game that they wanted, and that we would end up either limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice."
Wells says that fans shouldn't lose hope, and that a new Jak and Daxter game could still come eventually.
"Never say never," he said. "It could happen. 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 [The Last of Us] that we're definitely going to be supporting. I guess there's a possibility that the Uncharted team could move on to Jak and 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."
In the meantime, the Jak and Daxter Collection hits stores on February 7th. Be sure to read our impressions, and check back tomorrow for our full review.
