When Xbox 360 launched the current generation of consoles in 2005, it was all alone on the market for a full year. But if Sony stuck to its original plans for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 would have had some immediate competition. In interviews conducted forIGN’s History of Naughty Dog, multiple sources independently confirmed that PlayStation 3 was originally scheduled to come out in 2005.
Jak X – the late-generation racing title created by Naughty Dog for PlayStation 2 – was intended as a “stopgap” game for the studio after “the entire system (PlayStation 3) was delayed by a year,” according to one source. Originally, Naughty Dog was going to jump from Jak III to its first PlayStation 3 project, codenamed, at the time, Project Big. Had PlayStation 3 hit its original launch window, Jak X may have never existed.
