The Last of Us team at Naughty Dog was at one time working on a reboot for Jak & Daxter, the studio announced earlier. This is according to creative director Neil Druckmann who broke the news to the folks attending his talk at the IGDA 2013 conference last month in Toronto.
According to Druckmann, while working on Uncharted 2, he and Bruce Straley put a second team together to come up with another project.
“Our task was to reboot this game, Jak & Daxter,” he said. “So we spent a long time exploring the world of Jak & Daxter. How would we reboot it? What would it mean to bring these characters back? What are some story ideas that we were getting excited by? And as much as we liked a lot of these concepts and kind of exploring this fantastical world, we found that the ideas we were passionate about were kind of getting away from what Jak & Daxter was.”
Druckmann said the team began to wonder if it was doing this for “marketing reasons” or if it was really wanting to create a Jak & Daxter reboot.
“We felt like we weren’t doing service to what fans of this franchise really liked, even if the reinvented Daxter is pretty damn good-looking,” he said. “So we went to our boss, and said, ‘do we have to do this?’ And he said ‘no, I just thought it would be easier for you guys if you started something. But if you want something else, come up with something else.’”
