Earlier in the summer, PlayStation developer sucker punch revealed that despite months of rumors to the contrary, no one — not themselves or any other developer — was working on a sequel to the Sly Cooper or Notorious franchises. With the studio now focused on what’s probably a Ghost of Tsushima continuation, the two franchises that helped it establish a presence as a top-tier PlayStation developer are on ice and will likely remain so for a few more years. And while normally such news would ultimately be disappointingly unsurprising, this only stings a small a little more than usual because the cunning franchise is now 20 years old.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus released on the PlayStation 2 on September 23, 2002. The titular Sly Cooper comes from a family of master thieves and with the help of his crew – Bentley, a brain turtle and Murray, the hippo mate – travels the world to open the pages of his title book. family of the gang that killed his father and left him an orphan. Like most games of that era with a protagonist in an animal, cunning was a platform game; each of the game’s five hub zones featured levels where a key waited at the end that would be used to get Sly to fight the zone’s boss and recover a page from his family book. Those pages would then lead to a new mechanic to improve his thief repertoire.
Despite being praised in reviews as a solid platformer, the game didn’t sell very well at first, but eventually sold enough to join PlayStation’s “Greatest Hits” lineup. With that success came two sequels, both of which sold and rated equally well: 2004’s Band of Thieves Bentley and Murray made fully playable characters (exchanged through a safehouse at each location) with their own missions as the trio carried out a series of heists around the world. Honor among thieves, the trilogy released in 2005 had the trio expand their gang to reach the vault of the Cooper line, though those characters could only be played for a handful of missions under specific circumstances.
The biggest problem the cunning franchise ultimately had was that it was often overshadowed by its brothers in arms, Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank and Naughty Dogs Jak & Daxter. Despite the three franchises being lumped together due to their shared status of starting out as standard platformers, cunning was actually the outlier of the trinity, not helped by jako and rattle aimed at a slightly older audience. Even if their protagonists were respectively a dumb (initial) elf with a chatty weasel on his shoulder and a cat with a talking backpack, those franchises’ focus on guns, some raunchy humor, and a teen rating were more appealing compared to the E for everyone. adventures of a raccoon who commits crimes with a turtle and a hippo.
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But while the Sly Cooper franchise didn’t have the edge of its peers, it made up for it in style. It was the way the games fully embraced being cartoonish by calling each location an “episode,” complete with a smashing map and title like watching a cartoon after coming home from school. Along with cel-shaded cutscenes that gave a brief overview of the villain, who was usually an average person who decided to commit crime out of sheer resentment, it was the little things like comic book sound effects that showed up when enemies were defeated or how footsteps would be accentuated. by strumming the guitar when sneaking behind guards or along rooftops. Even if stealth and crime games have remained fairly favored in the industry, there is no such thing as Sly Cooper there now.
After Honor among thieves wrapped an arc on the trilogy, things got…weird for the franchise. Sucker Punch entered the PlayStation 3 era with its superhero saga infamous, and whether the studio would ever return to? cunning was answered once and never came back. In 2013, Sanzaru Games brought back the series with Thieves in time, which was…fine, from what I remember, but I certainly haven’t played it as much as those earlier games. The following year saw a trailer for a CG Movie Adaptation from Rainmaker and Blockade Entertainment that honestly still looks pretty good. (Except Murray, something about his proportions and face doesn’t feel right.) Sadly, it was a movie that slowly fell apart before finally being cancelled, thanks in part to Rainmaker’s box office failure. Ratchet & Clank movie.
So where is the franchise now? On a game front, freezing cold at the moment, as previously mentioned; but there is rumbling inside recent years about a TV show in production by PlayStation Studios. Considering how hard Sony is trying to get their games on the market small and silver screens— they do a Gravity Rush movie, of all things, na shut down the studio that made that series – it wouldn’t be out of the question, nor would it be totally unwelcome, given how cunning has television essentially encoded in its DNA. But as much as I’m looking forward to that, I think I’d rather have a new one cunning game first. like how tear apart served as a reminder of what made Ratchet & Clank so special that it would feel wrong to bring the Cooper Gang back without giving them another chance to steal players’ hearts through a new game.
You can play the cunning games via streaming if you have the Premium tier of PlayStation Plus.
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