Enjoyable, but not exactly world-changing. At its heart, it was a platformer with some technical brilliance, but for players it was mostly just a very, very good game. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy wasn’t GTA 3. Limits were split apart.īut let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Levels broke out of the thin, narrow walls by which Crash was contained. The aim was to create a seamless open world environment without load-screens, to create an environment at a scale hitherto unseen. When Naughty Dog were busy making Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, the team learned of the existence of the PlayStation 2, but only two programmers were spared to begin production on what eventually would become Jak and Daxter. After this game, it would seem Naughty Dog’s palette would get progressively darker, and more, dare I say it, mature. Even the colours seemed a little more muted than the brash, bright tones of Crash. Yet this PS2 title marked a change in the company’s ambitions. The two even share a designer in Charles Zembillas, who also designed Spyro the Dragon. You could see it all over its colourful world and in its whimsy and kinetic platforming. The character, personality, and level design of The Precursor Legacy had the genetics, the DNA, of that other lovable Naughty Dog creature and mascot: Crash Bandicoot. It’s an anniversary worth celebrating - to ponder not what could have been, but what actually came to pass.

We can see some of those germs of greatness in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, which celebrates its 20th anniversary today.

Related: I Miss Demo Discs And Tomb Raider’s Sense of Discoveryīut the seeds of Naughty Dog’s greatness were sown before that. The Last of Us series combines triple-A excellence with storytelling unseen in games, with a daring willingness to test the limits of the player’s empathy and question their moral judgements. The Uncharted series treated players to such amazing action adventure that the likes of Steven Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan, and George Lucas might even tip their hats to. Naughty Dog has set the standard for animation, cinematics, and narrative brilliance. From the PS3 era onward, it has become associated with a certain level of excellence. We know what they became: one of the greatest video games developers of all time. With a company like Naughty Dog, we don’t need to ask such questions. What could have been had James Dean lived? What could have been had that relationship of mine survived? What if I had had a GameCube instead? What if The Last Jedi had been a good movie? What could have been? It is a question some of us may ask, in the depths of winter, whilst pondering the orb.

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