Neil Druckmann has confirmed at his IGDA keynote that The Last of Us team – which were separate from the people making Uncharted – were originally working on a new Jak & Daxter title, rather than a brand new IP.
“Our task was… and this is the first time we’re showing this, to reboot Jak & Daxter. And these are some of the concepts.”
“So we spent a lot of time exploring the world of Jak & Daxter,” Druckmann continues, before saying that they spent a lot of time exploring these concepts and this “fantastical world”. They soon found that their best ideas were getting away from Jak, and questioned whether that it was for marketing reasons that they were using the Jak & Daxter prefix.
They felt as though they weren’t serving the fans, even if the redesigned Daxter “was pretty good looking” and essentially asked their boss whether they needed to do it. His answer was no, and that it would just be easier for them to start with something, but they could go ahead and do something else if they wanted.
That led to The Last of Us, ideas of which had their roots back in 2004, and involved George Romero, the father of zombie films, who played Druckmann’s zombie game prototype, which formed the basis for The Last of Us once he revisited the characters later in a comic book.
It’s quite impressive to see how this game came to be, and the full keynote is an hour and twenty minutes long. If the above embed doesn’t work for you, you can watch it over on YouTube here.
englishgolfer
That was unexpected. Glad they went down the “last of Us” route though.
blackredyellow
Obviously they did an extremely good job with TLoU. However, I would love to see a brand new Jak & Daxter, all shiny and HD on PS4.
Jakster123x
It’s about time we got some pictures of these concepts.
Wozman23
They mentioned this early on, but it’s nice to see concepts.
That being said, those Daxter reboots look terrible. Way too much of a contrast compared to the cartoonish originals. I’d love a new entry, but it doesn’t need a stylistic reboot, especially one that caters to realism.
If that’s where they were headed, they made the right decision to abandon it. That decision ushered forth one of the best games of this generation, and didn’t ruin one of the greatest from last gen.
Kennykazey
Still waiting on UnKarted.
boeboe
Looks like the bloody Crack Fox!
3shirts
I’m gonna make you wear a little dress and hurt you
JR.
Only wanted to watch five or ten minutes and ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll regret this in 4 hours when I have to get up for work but it was really interesting to see the original story for TLoU and all the changes that were made down the line. As for J&D… I’d love another Jak & Daxter game but I’m not sure if ND should do it. It would feel like a huge step back for them now. Maybe if they had another developer work on it like Sanzaru did with Sly: Theives In Time? They did a great job.
3shirts
That’s really interesting. I’m glad they went the way they did but, as blackredyellow said above, I’d really love some new Jak & Daxter. Replaying them via the HD trilogy reminded me how much I loved the characters and the world.
TSBonyman
That was unexpected.
MayContainEvil
New Jak and Daxter please! On PS4, naturally, and it had better be very shiny.