As we all know, the PlayStation 3 released in 2006 (or 2007 depending on your region), but if a report from IGN is to be believed, it was originally planned to come out one year prior in 2005.
Citing unnamed sources that came forth during their interviews for a Naughty Dog piece, one person said that Jak X was created to be a “stopgap” for the generation shift as “the entire [PlayStation 3] system was delayed by a year.” That source then went on to explain:
We had started this ICE [Initiative For A Common Engine] team with the intent of developing some core technology that could be shared amongst all the first parties, back at the end of Jak II. We thought, ‘okay, Jak III will come out – that was 2004 – and then we’d have another year. Then we’d get our PS3 game out.
That’s the reason why we got Amy [Hennig, creator of Uncharted] down here, because we needed a game director to start coming up with ideas for our first PS3 game. Then we found out that it was going to be delayed by a year. So she worked on Jak III.
Then she started working on [Jak III]. Then we realized that we needed to stick another project in there, and we wanted her to be able to work on the PS3 game. That’s why we did Jak X, to fill in that extra year there. I guess we had really crazy ideas of what the PS3 might be capable of.
For a while, [PS3 had] no GPU, it was going to run everything with XPUs. The ICE team proved to Japan that it was just impossible. It would be ridiculous. Performance-wise, it would be a disaster. That’s why they finally added the GPU, closer to the end.
After a different source also talked about how the PS3 didn’t have a GPU for a while, another source said, “I think that the hardware guys focused too much on getting the [Sony’s proprietary processor] CELL working that the GPU project [for PlayStation 3] ultimately fell behind.”
Sony didn’t respond to any of these claims, so treat all of this as a rumor for now.
