Naughty Dog is hard at work on their new post-apocalyptic zombie project titled, The Last of Us, and from what we’ve seen so far it looks to be yet another enticing and action-packed experience. According to a recent interview with Game Informer however, the game was very close to becoming a shelved idea. The Uncharted developer in fact took a hard look into creating another installment in the Jak & Daxter franchise. Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells commented on how the critically-acclaimed platforming duo very nearly made a comeback.
“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. 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.”
Wells stated that ultimately, the team came to the conclusion that making a new Jak & Daxter game at this point in time would simply do fans “a disservice.”
“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.”
Though Jak and his otter-weasel pal won’t be starring in any big releases in the near future, Wells did not rule out the possibility of eventually making a return to the beloved franchise.
“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. 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.”
If you haven’t yet seen Naughty Dog’s new upcoming project, The Last of Us, check it out below. If you’re a Jak & Daxter fanatic however, you will probably now forever look at this game in spite.
