You probably know Naughty Dog for either the Uncharted or The Last of Us games – and for good reason. It’s pretty much all the esteemed studio has been working on over the past 15 years. Since 2007, the company’s focus has been on popcorn action-adventure games, and soulful stories about faux parental relationships in a ruined post-apocalyptic wasteland.
But what if I was to tell you that the kernels for these games were sewn long before Drake was even a glint in the developer’s proverbial eye? What if I was to tell you that the studio’s penchant for heart-rending character development actually began before either of these PlayStation juggernaut series was even conceived? Way back in 2003, Naughty Dog was teasing out the foundations of what would become some of the most successful franchises of all time in a little game called Jak 2.
If you played the first game in the series – or indeed any of the Crash Bandicoot games that preceded that – Jak 2 is a shock to the system. Naughty Dog, in a breath, discarded the rainbow palettes and mild peril of everything that had come before to instead focus on a grim, industrialised sci-fi GTA-like sandbox.
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