When Naughty Dog unveiled The Last of Us late last year, the studio made the surprising announcement that they had secretly split into two teams shortly after the completion of Uncharted 2 back in 2009. Now, co-president Evan Wells has revealed that the studio was once considering a very different project, a new entry in the Jak & Daxter series.
"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," Wells explained in an interview with Game Informer. "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 honor."
Wells said the plans eventually fell apart when they realized a Jak & Daxter sequel would leave either the developers or the fans unsatisfied.
"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."
The Jak & Daxter franchise was last seen on the PlayStation 2, though an HD collection featuring remastered versions of all three main entries in the series will be out tomorrow for the PS3.
But will we ever see a new Jak & Daxter title from Naughty Dog? Wells isn't ruling anything out, though he doesn't see it happening anytime soon.
"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."
