The legend of Jak and Daxter is one that has existed for hundreds of years, passed down from generation to generation. But somewhere along the line the story was lost. It was only by chance that anyone ever heard of these brave heroes ever again.

"It was just after we finished college", explains Andy Gavin who, with Jason Rubin, co-founded Naughty Dog. "We both wanted to work in the games industry and had made a couple of games in our garage. Then one day, out of the blue, we got a call from this guy called Gil Archeron. He was this weird recluse living on this island in Tokyo. He told us he had this massive new idea for a game engine and needed a story and some characters. We'd already stumbled across the precursor legend and had come up with a couple of fun characters of our own so we just gave him them to play with. Then we lost touch with him. Next thing we hear, the game's been canned and he's disappeared."

Some years later, after they'd completed Crash Team Racing, Andy and Jason remembered the story they'd crafted for Archeron. Realising that the story of Jak and Daxter's discovery of the Precursor relics was up for grabs, Andy, along with Jason Rubin, set to work on adapting the story for a new generation. When they got the go-ahead to work on PlayStation 2, they knew Jak and Daxter would be the perfect first project for the new console and set to work straight away.

Andy's mention of Archeron led us to do a little investigation of our own. It seems that back in 1990, a Japanese company announced that Gil Archeron would be working with them in the creation of a game based on the Jak and Daxter story. Archeron, was an infamous recluse, living and working in an ultra-modern house on an island just off the south coast of Japan. As he very rarely left the island and spoke to people only by telephone or e-mail, it was only when he failed to deliver the game by the deadline three years later that it was discovered that he had disappeared.

It was while we were compiling our previews for Jak and Daxter that we received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have worked for Archeron until his disappearance. As our source still works in the industry he asked to remain anonymous, but he confided in us that some of the original game files that Archeron worked on might still exist.

"It was so strange. We had the entire office set up so Archeron could just send the game to us by remote. We waited and waited and after two days they told us we could go home - we were exhausted! When we all came back to work, we were sent a memo telling us that Archeron had disappeared and that he'd locked his computer with a password so we couldn't get at the game."

All that they had to work on were Archeron's original test levels to show the sort of thing he was thinking about. He had programmed only very basic text and not all of the characters or enemies were in place. So here, for the first time, are the only surviving levels from Archeron's lost classic, featuring the characters Jak and Daxter as the Naughty Dog boys first imagined them.