Jak and Daxter was a 3D platformer about a kid wearing a backpack. Banjo-Kazooie was a 3D platformer about a bear wearing a backpack. Ratchet & Clank was a 3D platformer about a lombax wearing a backpack.

The late '90s and early '00s were chock full of games starring characters who wouldn't go anywhere without slinging their friend on their shoulders. It's a mechanical conceit that made a lot of sense, with a story and gameplay purpose. It gave your lead character someone to talk to as well as a sidekick who could help them out with tasks along the way. Clank and Kazooie let Ratchet and Banjo glide, while Jak used Daxter to attack enemies.

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But over time, this back-to-school aesthetic has disappeared. Though Ratchet & Clank is still going strong, the other two series I mentioned haven't gotten new installments in 14 years (in Banjo-Kazooie's case) and 17 years (in Jak and Daxter's case). It may seem like this mechanic came and went, but it's more accurate to say it was a stepping stone in the evolution of triple-A games.

Before creating Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter, Insomniac and Naughty Dog made Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, respectively. Both of those games offered distinct takes on how to adapt the platformer from 2D, the dimensions it had largely occupied until that point, to 3D, a new frontier. Spyro offered a series of open-ended worlds, while Crash spun his way through strictly linear levels. Both games were solving the same problem, and as each series evolved over their PS1 trilogies, their developers became increasingly adept at going beyond simple translation, and continued to iterate on the idea of what a 3D platformer could be.

When Insomniac and Naughty Dog began working with the PS2, both studios abandoned their old mascots in favor of new, slightly more mature ones for the new generation. Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter were still cartoonish, but their worlds were more detailed, their protagonists were more realistically proportioned, and their combat was a little more violent. The biggest change in all this was the introduction of new sidekick characters for each protagonist to work with and talk to, an addition that allowed for a greater emphasis on story, and for novel types of gameplay that weren't possible for Spyro, accompanied by the silent and often useless Sparx, and Crash, who was accompanied by no one.

In the PS3 era, Naughty Dog redefined what a sidekick character looked like, leaving Jak and Daxter behind to make Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. In that game, Nathan Drake's sidekicks were people, not anthropomorphic animals he could wear on his back. They still talked to him about the environment and what was happening in the story, but they could also move around the level, point out clues, help solve puzzles, and move objects around. In combat, they helped out too, taking cover and shooting at enemies.

Though Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley initially planned to revive Jak and Daxter with a PS3 reboot, that game eventually morphed into The Last of Us. If you know its origins, you can see the shared DNA between the two series. Both games have one larger character, who the player primarily controls, and a smaller character who works with them. The Last of Us took this further than the games of the PS2 era had been able to, building a believable surrogate father/daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie. This worked as well as it did because Ellie was a separate character with her own motivations, not just an extension of Joel. The game managed to wring this distance for some of its most emotional beats. Some of the most impactful moments in the games are the times when Joel and Ellie are separated from each other.

Everything old tends to come back around, and that's true of backpack mascots. While Naughty Dog's method is more common in the triple-A space, with games like God of War, BioShock: Infinite, Ghost of Tsushima, Red Dead Redemption 2 and many more sending NPC sidekicks out on missions with their protagonists, the backpack sidekick is making a minor resurgence. Ratchet & Clank has carried the torch for all these years across 17 games. But some of the former Rare talent behind Banjo-Kazooie brought this mechanic back in Yooka-Laylee and in Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. As with most things, there's room for both. Just maybe not on your back.

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