Naughty Dog has revealed that the development team working on The Last of Us nearly made a new entry in the Jak and Daxter franchise instead.In the end though, the team decided the project would “do everybody a disservice” – both fans and the creators themselves.

“We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘Where’s the next Jak & Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively,” said Naughty Dog co-founder Evan Wells in an interview with Game Informer.

Wells went on to add: “Even if we felt like we were 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 realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction.”

Fans shouldn’t give up hope that the series will never return, though. “It could happen. Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy…” said Wells. “I guess there’s a possibility that the Uncharted team could move on to Jak and Daxter. 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 with that team that we did with this team.”

Lucky for fans of the series, the Jak and Daxter HD Collection hits store shelves this week in North America and later this month in Europe.

Do you want another entry in the Jak and Daxter series or are you happy Naughty Dog has moved on to other franchises?