Many studios have been seeing success by bringing back some of their older franchises for modern audiences with a fresh coat of paint, Sony has managed to avoid touching PS2-era franchise Jak and Daxter. However, this wasn’t due to lack of trying, as it turns out. Veteran animator in the games industry Travis Howe has revealed through a LinkedIn post that the team he was working with had once approached Sony about remastering the original Jak and Daxter.
In his post, Howe said that he was in charge of creating a shot-for-shot recreation of one of the game’s early cutscenes as part of the pitch to show Sony what it would look like. He has also made it clear that the cutscene’s recreation was not commissioned by Sony, and the PlayStation maker had no involvement in the proposal. Further in the comments for his post, Howe also credits Sanzaru Games senior character artist Tyler Bronis for his work on the animated short.
“A long while back, a team was assembled to pitch a remaster of Jak & Daxter. I was asked to animate an IGC shot-for-shot, to show what this updated version would look like,” wrote Howe. “To be abundantly clear: this was NOT commissioned by Sony, nor did they have any involvement in our proposal — this was essentially a fan pitch to try and gain their permission.”
The cutscene’s recreation is quite an impressive one, seemingly making use of modern technologies to render things like the fur on Daxter’s body, and more modern implementations of things like particle effects, which were much harder to render on the original’s PS2 hardware.
In his own post about the project, Bronis revealed that the pitch was worked on back in 2019. His own involvement at the time revolved around remaking Jak’s model, along with environment art and lighting, and the camera work and editing.
The video has seen a positive response, with former Naughty Dog writer and narrative designer Josh Scherr commenting about how well it was pulled off. Scherr had worked on the Jak and Daxter games, and was an animator on this scene in particular.
“This is wild – I was the animator on the original scene way back in 2001,” wrote Scherr. “Y’all did a great job! On the original game each cinematics animator had to churn out 30 seconds of animation per week, so it’s nice to see it looking more polished.”
Currently, the Jak and Daxter series is essentially missing. The last time we got any official word on the franchise was back in 2021, with Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells confirming that a new Jak and Daxter game was not in the works. In a discussion with Insomniac’s Ted Price, Wells was asked whether Naughty Dog still gets requests for a new entry in the franchise.
“We do, in fact,” he replied. “We’ve had a couple of Twitter campaigns where people have been tweeting us every single day [saying] ‘I want a new Jak and Daxter, I want a new Jak and Daxter’, and they aren’t just simple 280-character tweets, they have Photoshopped memes and everything they’re including on a daily basis, and the effort has got to be significant.”
“And I hate to break it to them, [but] we do not have Jak and Daxter here in development right now.”
