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How playing the Jak and Daxter games, helped me open up to my girlfriend and eventual wife [Gamify My Life]

She didn't want to play them herself, but it felt important that she understand Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter if she was going to understand me.

Gamify My Life Jak And Daxter — Image credit: Naughty Dog/Popverse

Features by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Dec 01 2025

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How playing the Jak and Daxter games, helped me open up to my girlfriend and eventual wife

You can tell a lot about someone based on the art they love. Not that I’m out here saying that anyone who likes Dexter is a serial killer or everyone who loves Berserk needs to be locked up – I like both those things, after all. But if you want to get to know someone, you have to get to know their favorite art. For me, that meant introducing my wife to Jak and Daxter, my favorite video game series, back when we were first dating, whether she wanted me to or not.

This wasn’t as easy a job as you might think. This was back in the late '00s, when the Jak and Daxter series was still firmly on the PS2, with no eventual port to successive consoles in sight or digital distribution. I couldn’t exactly bring my copies from the US to play on her UK PS2 because of that pesky regional locking. So, I ended up having to track down copies of each of the games in my new home nation. But I never doubted that I would do it.

Jak And Daxter Interupting Kiss — Image credit: Naughty Dog

See, Jak and Daxter has a very special place in my heart. For my money, it is the best, most interesting series that Naughty Dog has done. The first four core games (I’m discounting Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier because it was generally pants) are all a little different. The first one is very much a kid’s game in the same vein as Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot, with bright colors and a relatively straightforward plot. It is simple and wholesome if not exactly challenging.

Then there is an almost violent tonal shift in the subsequent games. Jak gets flung into a dystopian future and gets possessed by a thirst for violence that doesn’t seem to go away when he manages to kill the man who tortured him for two years. But even with all that darkness, it retained the bright, almost Saturday Morning Cartoon aesthetic. The juxtaposition was jarring when playing it upon release, but I’ve come to realize that it is what makes this series so good. There is magic in the way Naughty Dog blends the visuals and plot that surpasses even their work on Uncharted and The Last of Us.

The problem? My now-wife-then-girlfriend had no interest in playing the Jak and Daxter series. She’s a turn-based RPG girlie through and through, which meant that the action-platforming mixed with shooting and driving of this series was very much not in her wheelhouse. But, see, it was important to me to show her these games because they are important to me. I’ve memorized nearly every part of the games, complete with excessive voice actor trivia and the location of some of the most obscure collectables in each title. I wanted to share these things with her… so I played them myself.

Jak 2 Screenshot — Image credit: Naughty Dog

I didn’t just play them, though. I made them into a shared experience. A few hours a week (we were young university students then, so we had plenty of free time to spare) to work through each game. She wasn’t entirely sold on the first game simply because it was so simple and, admittedly, childish in tone. She was slightly taken aback by the sudden change in Jak II. She saw the big twist about Jak and Damas coming a mile away. She was baffled by the decision to create a racing game, but mainly because she doesn’t like Mario Kart, and Jak X is just edgy Mario Kart.

What she did take away from the experience is the kind of stories I love and the characters I cling to.

But she stuck with watching me play because it was something we could do together, and it taught her a little more about me. About my sense of humor and love for mature stories told in animation. The kind of stories I love and the characters I cling to, like nerdy love interests like Keira or gentle giants like Sig. She learned about my love for heroes with the dark secret and the plucky sidekicks who make the best of a bad situation. These formative stories became not just for me but for our relationship as a whole.

Jak and Daxter went from simply one of my favorite game series to one of the first memories we made together. Though she’s never played any of the games, they’ve become part of our shared life. I couldn’t say exactly what she learned about me from Jak and Daxter, but 16 years later, we’re still together, so hopefully it was good.

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