Naughty Dog explored new Jak & Daxter before starting The Last of Us

The Last of Us is Naughty Dog's first new property since Uncharted: Drake's Fortune launched in 2007, but the developer first considered returning to its Jak and Daxter series. In a recent interview, co-president Evan Wells revealed that the team looked at the idea "fairly extensively," but couldn't quite make it work.

"Something that we talked about early on was, 'Lets go back and apply what we've learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter,'" Evans said.

"It's one of the franchises that's near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we'd like to somehow honor," Wells told Game Informer magazine (transcribed by VG247).

As the existence of action-y survival-ish horror The Last of Us clearly shows, it didn't pan out.

"Even if we felt like we're going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren't going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice."

Still, J&D fans will get to relive the glory days this week, when HD revamps of the first three games in the series arrive on PlayStation 3 in the Jak and Daxter Collection.

[Story image from the J&D Collection]