Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells has debunked speculations about the studio working on a new Jak & Daxter game, but added that he “wishes” that it was.
Wells made his remarks while speaking to Insomniac Games CEO, Ted Price, during the Academy of Interactive Arts & Science’s Game Maker’s Notebook series (transcript provided by Video Games Chronicle). Wells revealed that seeing Insomniac’s work on Ratchet & Clank series is one of the reasons he wishes Naughty Dog was working on Jak & Daxter.
We’ve had a couple of Twitter campaigns where people have been tweeting us every single day [saying] ‘I want a new Jak & Daxter, I want a new Jak & 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 & Daxter here in development right now. But 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 & Daxter in the studio.
Wells went on to reveal why a PSP version of Jak & Daxter was ultimately cancelled.
At the end of Uncharted 2, Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann went off to start designing The Last of Us, although they did spend a good, solid three or four months working on Jak and Daxter before they decided to shelve it and focus on something new.
Wells didn’t say if Jak & Daxter has been shelved for good or not.
[Source: VGC]
