Naughty Dog: Last of Us team almost developed a PS3 Jak & Daxter

Naughty Dog's second team, currently hard at work on The Last of Us, was almost assigned the task of rebooting Jak & Daxter for the PS3, the developer has revealed. In an interview with Game Informer (via Destructoid), co-president Evan Wells reveals that before The Last of Us had been conceived, the team “fairly extensively” explored the possibility of re-inventing the PS2 favorite in a more realistic, Uncharted-esque vein.

Having spent three games making the transition from brightly-colored platform romp to ever-edgier revenge saga, Jak & Daxter almost made the transition to PS3 when Naughty Dog began looking to leverage the technology developed for Uncharted 2. However this would have necessitated an even greater shift in tone, says the team's creative director, Neil Druckmann: “We had to reboot it essentially. Every time we got excited about an idea we’d take a step back and look at it and be like ‘It’s not Jak and Daxter'.”

Wells grants the company's still not done with the idea of a relaunched Jak & Daxter. “To say we’ll never go back [to the series] is kind of crazy,” he says, though between Uncharted and The Last of Us, the beloved IP isn't a high priority at the moment. “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” as the Last of Us team did, he admits. Still, if there's one thing the last few years have shown us, it's that you're never too old for a reboot, provided it's gritty enough...