Jak and Daxter was a pretty huge series on the PS2, with three major titles released over a three year period, a racing spin-off and a port of the PSP title The Last Frontier all doing fairly well. With the release of the Jak and Daxter Collection this week in the states and in a few weeks everywhere else, the series is likely to see both new and returning fans after a continuation of the series.
It turns out that it nearly happened, with Naughty Dog revealing that they had planned a Jak and Daxter reboot for the PS3 when they set up a second development team. The following is an excerpt from an article by Game Informer:
"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. 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.
"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 and Daxter Jak and Daxter. Even if we felt like we're going to give the fans another Jak and 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 realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point the conversations started to move in new directions.
"Now is not the time. Never say never. It could happen. Naughty Dog's got a long history and I think it's got a long future, so to say well 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 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."
