In a somewhat ill-timed announcement (I promise it’s not an April Fools joke), the Jak & Daxter-porting OpenGOAL team revealed its complete PC port of Jak 3 yesterday, completing its years-long project to natively port the entire trilogy to PC.
It still requires a legally-obtained copy of Jak 3 to run, similar to an emulator or unofficial porting projects for other games, but OpenGOAL offers a far superior experience to emulation or even original hardware: It’s less resource-intensive, has fewer (if any) bugs, and offers more configuration options and modding possibilities (ultrawide ahoy). I used OpenGOAL to replay the first two Jaks on my Steam Deck a few years ago, and they ran like a dream.
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OpenGOAL seems to primarily be an exercise in curiosity, mastering the titular programming language, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp. It was developed by Naughty Dog and exclusively used in the Jak trilogy and its spinoff, Combat Racing. Notably, the PSP spinoffs, Daxter and The Lost Frontier, were not made with GOAL or by Naughty Dog, so the OpenGOAL team won’t be touching them.
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They haven’t ruled out Jak X: Combat Racing entirely, though. The team’s somewhat out-of-date FAQ page says that “As of now, it’s unsure if Jak X will be decompiled.” But that seems to have been written before Jak 2 OpenGOAL was finished all the way back in 2023.
Never say die, then, if you’re one of the 12 or so people in the world who are really passionate about Jak X: Combat Racing preservation. As for me, I’ve got to find the time to revisit Jak 3—these are some foundational games for me, and they’ve got an aesthetic, a vibe, that you really can’t find anywhere else. I’d postponed completing my big trilogy replay until the OpenGOAL team’s work was done.
Jak and Daxter has aged wonderfully. Jak 2, well, I think the mockery of its edgelord turn is overblown—this is still a weird and whimsical world—but the game treats checkpoints like they’re the last precious doubloons of a squandered fortune, begrudgingly sliding one your way every few weeks or so. Jak 2 is frustrating. I hope Jak 3 is better in that regard. I don’t remember either way—I literally haven’t played it in 22 years.
If you’ve got your PS2 copy of Jak 2 handy, you should be able to copy an OpenGOAL-ready disk image of it with most Blu-ray drives and a utility like MPF or ImgBurn—both recommended by the PCSX2 emulator community. From there, OpenGOAL has an installer and instructions on its website, including for Steam Deck.
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