10 Iconic Video Games You Had NO IDEA Were Originally Sequels

Originally: Jak and Daxter 4

After the massive success Naughty Dog achieved with Uncharted 2, the rest of the studio focused on pushing ahead with part three of Nathan Drake’s adventures, while a newly formed B-team was splintered off to work on something else in parallel.

Neil Druckmann spearheaded this smaller team, tasked with figuring out what that project would be. Originally, the assignment was to make a new Jak and Daxter entry - the studio’s flagship PS2 franchise. They kicked around ideas and entered early conceptual stages, but their hearts were elsewhere. The most exciting ideas they were coming up with felt like they belonged to a completely different kind of game.

What those ideas were exactly remains a mystery: Jak as a sad dad to Daxter’s wayward sidekick? On-the-fly weapon building mechanics? Stealth and action mixed with horror tension? It’s hard to picture any of that fitting into a world with a talking animal, but whatever it was, it was enough to convince the team to shed the shackles of the IP entirely and place the mechanics around something brand new, switching it with a pitch Druckmann had been carrying with him since his university days.

The rest, as they say, is history. It resulted in one of the studio’s most celebrated games and a defining title of its era, with Druckmann eventually becoming head of the studio - no doubt thanks to his work on it.