Playstation announced on April 3 that the classic Jak & Daxter series would be coming to the Playstation store and that Jak X: Combat Racing. With the classic series comes our own hopes and wishes that the duo will be back for another hilarious journey, but are these just dreams or could there be more?
Playstation previously released the HD collection for the PS3, but why bring back the game again on next gen console unless they were prepping fans for more? The last installment of the series, Combat Racing, was a one off and didn’t feel like a real resolution to the series because it wasn’t meant to be at all. A reboot of the series would be amazing for fans but Naughty Dog has had only one instance of actually planning a follow-up but was ultimately canceled.
Initial efforts to make the game a reality stemmed from rumors, artwork and the transition from PS2 to PS3. In 2006 there was the developmental title Jak and Daxter: The Last Frontier. This turned out to be a registration title that was given to High Impact Games who would develop the game. This was the prime time frame for the aforementioned transition between consoles and was described in the book The Art of Naughty Dog: Naughty Dog Studios as:
Imagine the two co-founders of Naughty Dog passing the torch to new management — we were switching to brand-new rendering technology with the extraordinarily complicated hardware architecture of the PS3, and literally building our entire code base up from scratch.
By 2009 with the game released, Naughty Dog expressed regret in the process and stated they would have “Done some things differently.” If the series were to make a come back, the only way to gage interests would be a re-release of the existing games. If this is a move to do so, and not just a money grab by Playstation, hopefully we will be getting more hints in the near future. The last official mention of a sequel by the company came in 2013 when in an interview with IGN Sony president Andrew House stated it was, “Never off the table.”
With Crash Bandicoot coming as a remaster in 2017, maybe Naughty Dog is planning some great revisits in the coming years for next gen consoles.
