Okay ... time to start making a game if we want to hit early Christmas. Racing is something Naughty Dog has had a bit of experience with -- Crash Team Racing was a great ride for all of us, way back in ancient 1999. In fact, I think we spent as many hours playing CTR as we did making it, and that's a good sign.

But this time, it's not going to be a big head kart racer. Jak is more sophisticated, and that's the kind of game we want to make -- tougher vehicles, cooler weapons, bigger crashes, sexier. Ah ... anyway. We knew we had a great cast of characters, and plenty of cool locations from the Jak universe. But where to start? This couldn't be a continuation of the Jak series. We'd completed the trilogy story with Jak 3, finishing the story about Jak's past and the truth about the Precursors. Been there.

We wanted Jak X to be a standalone product, burrowing from the world we'd created, but not as a fourth installment of some on-going story. No, this was not Jak 4 ... so how about calling it Jak X. Yes! "Xtreme" sports, eXtreme racing! "X" not being a specific number, but part of the whole. So Jak X (plus Combat Racing) it was!


Now to put the Dog scent on it. In true Naughty Dog fashion, we wanted to take a genre traditionally light in story, and add a whole new dimension of narrative, emotion, plot cause and effect, and reasons for doing what you do in the game. We like to call it "narrative as reward," and we started this idea way back on Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. We always strive to create compelling moments in our games that are linked inextricably to story, so much so that a player wants to continue not just because the game is fun, but also because they want to know what happens.

So what's Jak X's core conflict? Well, in previous adventures Jak associated with some really nasty dudes. What do they say, "Lie with dogs and you just might come up with fleas," right? So Jak's past should come back to haunt him! And so that's how the story got started. But hold the Ottsel! This is a racing adventure, not a platform game. This is a whole different beast. We need the story to resolve itself as much on the track as in the cutscenes. We need racing to be the primary mechanic and the only way to resolve the issues at hand. It wouldn't do to have Jak say, "Okay everybody, someone's threatening to destroy the world ... let's go race!" The incongruity of this would be absurd! No, racing is the thing this time, and we need the story to complement the core racing experience.

The resolution has to come from driving vehicles, getting better speed on the tracks, and modifying your ride to win it all!