A lot of developers pitch things that never see the light of day. Maybe you’re the sort who’d rather not know about something that didn’t make it out of the pitch room to save yourself the heartache of a promise unfulfilled, or maybe you’d prefer to glimpse what could have been, even knowing that it will never actually be. If you’re a Jak and Daxter fan who’s been missing the PS2 platformers, it’s time to determine which camp you fall into, because as it turns out, a remake was pitched to Sony and turned down.
To be clear, Sony wasn’t actively exploring a Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy remake. This pitch was similar to the initial pitch for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, where developer Sanzaru brought the idea to Sony, which later signed off on it and allowed the team to create and release the PS3 sequel back in 2013. Travis Howe, a former animator at Sanzaru, posted a snippet to LinkedIn of a touched-up scene from the first Jak and Daxter game that was brought to Sony in 2019 as part of a pitch for a remake or remaster of that game (Howe uses the words interchangeably in his post). Despite the remake never seeing the light of day, Howe says he is “really proud” of how the scene of Daxter freaking out came together in the final pitch.
Travis Howe (Animator @ Sanzaru Games 2018-26) – “A while back, a team was assembled to pitch a remaster of Jak & Daxter. I was asked to animate an IGC shot-for-shot, to show what this updated version would look like.”
– not commissioned by Sony
– a fan pitch to gain permission pic.twitter.com/64TRzPahcu— Jak and Daxter | ECO-MMUNITY (@eco_mmunity) March 25, 2026
There hasn’t been a new Jak and Daxter game since 2009’s Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier, which launched on the PS2 and PSP under High Impact Games after original developer Naughty Dog passed it on to the other studio. Naughty Dog has said it considered creating a new game in the series again in the PS3 era but ultimately decided on making The Last of Us instead. Though it sounds like this remake pitch was shut down by Sony, it’s nice to know at least some people haven’t forgotten some of the PS2 classics.
Sanzaru was acquired by Meta and began to work primarily on VR games in 2020, and was subsequently shut down in January of this year.