Trivia / Tak and the Guardians of Gross

• B-Team Sequel: Due to Avalanche Software's involvement in the series getting Screwed by the Lawyers at the time due to their buyout by Disney, the game was outsourced to Licensed Game developer Blitz Games.
• Christmas Rushed: According to level designer Mike Blthell, not counting the time it probably spent on pre-production, the game was made in seven months.
  "We had seven months to make a game that was — and the pitch literally said this — Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time meets God of War. In seven months. And you know what, we got closer to that line than you would expect. But it was the best we could do in the time. So I experienced what licensed games used to be."
• Dummied Out: There's a lot of unused sound files in this game, most of which is described below.
  • Despite Lok and Zaria being reduced to The Ghost status in the PS2 version, their voice clips are still on the disc.
• Follow the Leader: In 2021, a guy from THQ who supervised the game's development confirmed what many already suspected that he had discussions about wanting it to be directly inspired by Shadow of the Colossus along with some elements taken from God of War II (which is funny as he also worked as part of the design team of the first game).
• Franchise Killer: This game's mediocre sales and reception, along with the complete failure of the TV show are what killed the Tak franchise stone dead.
• Invisible Advertising: It got a press release, one trailer and that's it.
• Production Posse: Much of the crew who worked on this game came from SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab. They even adopted the same team pseudonym as that game: Team RocFISH.
• Prop Recycling: Some assets from SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab and the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis tie-in game made by Blitz were blatantly reused in this. How much blatantly do you ask? To the point where they didn't even bother changing the character references so there are still various mentions of characters from that series throughout the files.
• Recursive Adaptation: A video game based on a TV show based on a video game series.
• The Other Darrin: Tak's voice actor in the previous games, Jason Marsden, was replaced by Hal Sparks, who also voiced Tak in the TV show.
  • Jibolba was also previously voiced by John Kassir, but was replaced by Lloyd Sherr in the TV show and this game.
• What Could Have Been: So... we are going through parts on this one:
  • About the game's pre-production:
    • It was initially supposed to be a direct successor to the first three games, being a much more open-ended 3D platformer, the Big Gs and their respective Juju guardians were going to be more directly based on the classical elements (earth◊, fire◊, air and water◊) instead of gross Bizarro Elements, and Tlaloc was going to make an appearance (at what role is unknown).
    • There was going to be a bigger variety of animals to interact throughout the game, such as an owl, a red panda◊,a pine martin, a mantis◊ and a rhino◊. The final game only includes a parrot and a monkey.
    • There was going to be more environments such as a beach area◊ and a place called The Dark Lands◊.
    • And then there are unused characters like The Dark Shamen◊, an unknown Juju◊, a rock monster◊ and a crab◊.
    • Only a playable demo showing Tak and Tlaloc in their Tak 2 models on an open dark village setting was done before they realized that their initial idea was too ambitious given their time and budget, so to accommodate their limitations they turned the game into short and linear 3D platformer with simplistic gameplay, along with a Denser and Wackier tone and plot.
    • Its initial title was Tak 4: The Guardians of Gross, in fact it still is referred to as Tak 4 in its internal files.
    • If this screenshot◊ from its now unavailable website is any proof, there were plans to make versions for Xbox 360, Nintendo DS (later confirmed to have been replaced by the DS exclusive title Tak: Mojo Mistake, which was released on the exact same day) and Game Boy Advance (coinciding with THQ's original plans to keep making titles for the system until 2008 before they were abandoned).
  • About the Dummied Out content in the final game, mostly based on unused voice clips:
    • Jibolba, Lok and Zaria were going to have more recurrent appearances throughout the game. In the end, only Jeera and The Chief got to appear in more than one level.
    • Keeko was actually going to appear in the game as an NPC. Instead he only appears in the beginning and ending video cutscenes.
    • In Slopviathan's level, Tak was going to create and use an item called Wax Spatula to remove wax obstacles.
    • The Jujus were going to act as some sort of Exposition Fairy / Mission Control constantly giving Tak hints throughout the levels, you can already guess why this was cut.
• Word of God: As mentioned above, years later one of the game's supervisors confirmed that it was indeed inspired by Shadow of the Colossus and that a DS version was planned but "the scope of the console game was too big for the mobile platforms at the time, so the concept got re-contextualized into Tak: Mojo Mistake".

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