Naughty Dog is a fairly important studio for Sony especially with its Uncharted and The Last of Us titles garnering immense critical and commercial success. However, it’s hard to forget some of its more classic franchises like Jak and Daxter, which served as excellent 3D platformers in the PlayStation 2 era. While the company is rumored to be working on a remake for The Last of Us 1, what are the chances of a new Jak and Daxter in the future?
Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells recently spoke about this with Insomniac’s Ted Price in the Game Maker’s Notebook series by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (transcription via VGC). Upon being asked whether the company receives requests for a new Jak and Daxter game, he replied, “We do, in fact. 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.” This doesn’t mean that Naughty Dog is down on the franchise though. As Wells notes, “We still love the characters and I see what you guys [at Insomniac] are doing with Ratchet and that makes me wish that we did, and we would have one in development, because there’s still a lot of love for Jak and Daxter in the studio.”
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was the first title in the series and launched in December 2001 for the PS2. It was followed by two sequels developed by Naughty Dog along with some spin-offs. High Impact Games would develop another sequel in 2009 for the PS2 and PSP while Jak and Daxter Collection, comprising HD ports of the first three games, would release in 2012 for PS3 and 2013 for PS Vita.