Disassembling Jak & Daxter

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2021-09-02 05:30:07

I don't work at Naughty Dog, and I don't have any secret knowledge of Jak & Daxter, except what I figured out myself from the disc. So a lot of this may well be wrong. Take a pinch of salt with it.

I've always had a fascination with Jak & Daxter ever since it came out, way back in 2001 on the PlayStation 2. It was one of the first 3D games I'd actually seen run at 60Hz. I was used to PC games like Quake which were software rendered, or games like Mario 64 which I played (and completed!) on UltraHLE at a woefully poor framerate. But Jak & Daxter, hereafter referred to as J&D, blew me away.

Here was a game running at a silky-smooth 60Hz, never missing a beat, and somehow managing to draw more polygons than any other game out there. A game where you could see and explore a vast world with no boundaries. No load screens, no pauses, no LOD pops. It all just fit together perfectly. I had to know more.

The J&D engine may possibly be one of the greatest engines ever made. Of course, because it's not open source, it doesn't get the recognition that more famous engines like Quake get. There's not much information out there about it, but there's a few snippets here and there. The most important for you to read would be Stephen White's 2003 GDC talk, "The Technology Of Jak & Daxter", which I can't find a link to any more but I've mirrored here:

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