New Jak and Daxter Game Was Explored by Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog, the studio behind the extremely popular Uncharted series, explored the idea of making an all-new Jak and Daxter game, but eventually scrapped it, as the studio couldn’t really do the classic series justice.

Naughty Dog delivered lots of great games over the years, amazing PlayStation 3 owners with the last three Uncharted action adventures titles. The studio is also famous for bringing PS2 users the older Jak and Daxter titles, which are soon going to be remastered in HD for the PS3.

Speaking with Game Informer about work on the studio’s newest project, The Last of Us, Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells admitted that an all-new Jak and Daxter game was on the drawing board.

"We'd all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, 'When's the next Jak and Daxter?' I don't know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively," explained Wells. "Something that we talked about early on was, 'Let's go back and apply what we've learned on the Uncharted games to Jak and Daxter.' It's one of the franchises that's near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we'd like to somehow honor."

This new knowledge, of making cinematic, lifelike experiences, didn’t exactly work with the Jak and Daxter recipe, so the studio ended up shelving the whole project and opted to put its new team to work on The Last of Us.

"But as we started exploring this and looking at ways we could evolve the game and apply the same narrative techniques that we had leveraged to good effect in the Uncharted series and bring the technology forward and allow us to render in a more realistic style like we were able to do in Uncharted, all the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak & Daxter, Jak & Daxter."

"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,” Wells admitted. “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 realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point the conversations started to move in new directions."

Wells concludes by saying that, while the studio’s Last of Us team is working on the upcoming game, there’s a possibility that the Uncharted group could pick up the Jak and Daxter game. Sadly, he admits that it’s possible they’ll run into the same problems, so who knows when a new title in the series might actually appear.

Until then, fans can get ready for the release of the Jak and Daxter HD Collection this month for the PS3.