Naughty Dog Almost Made New ‘Jak and Daxter’ Before Choosing ‘The Last of Us’

Jak and Daxter! Oh how I love you, though you continue to recede into the recesses of my brain-skull. Naughty Dog almost revived you, and then realized they could make way, way, way more  money making that Ellen Page Zombies Game they’re working on.

Joystiq:

Before deciding on the post-apocalyptic survival adventure  The Last of Us, Naughty Dog considered putting its team to work on a game starring a more familiar duo: Jak & Daxter. According to a Game Informer interview (quoted by  VG247), Naughty Dog looked into a new  Jak & Daxter  game on PS3. “I don’t know if this is going to make [fans] happy or sad,” but we did explore the idea fairly extensively,” company co-president Evan Wells said. “Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.'”

Wells and the team realized, however, that an experimental Jak game wouldn’t satisfy the fans, and working on a game like its predecessors wouldn’t satisfy Naughty Dog. “We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted,” he said. “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.”

Wells suggested the possibility that the  Uncharted  team could work on the series. “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.”

Oh, to dream. I don’t blame them. Wells doesn’t mention it, but there’s a certain marketability of old school cartoon-esque characters that doesn’t come close to zombie apocalypses these days.