Ratchet & Clank
series of third-person shooter and platformer video games
Ratchet & Clank is a series of action-adventure platform and third-person shooter video games created and developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment as a flagship title for Sony's PlayStation 2. High Impact Games developed two installments for the PlayStation Portable while other studios were involved in remasters and ports. An animated feature film adaptation was released in 2016 alongside a reimagining of the original game for the PlayStation 4; five years would pass until the next and most recent entry, Rift Apart, which was released for the PlayStation 5 and later ported to Windows.
The games take place in a science fiction setting and follow the adventures of Ratchet and Clank – a mechanic of the feline humanoid Lombax race, and a diminutive, sentient Zoni "defective" robot – as they travel through the universe, saving it from evil forces that consistently threaten it. The series is noted for its inclusion of many exotic, unique and over-the-top weapons and gadgets, a concept that Insomniac Games has expanded into their other games.
History
Following the development of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, the third installment of the Spyro series, Insomniac Games wanted to move into a new intellectual property, since the Spyro series was owned by Universal Interactive Studios. With the PS2 recently announced in 2000, Insomniac began to prototype ideas for games on this new console. One, called Monster Knight, never got past the prototyping stage, while a second, called Girl with a Stick and aimed to be a mashup of The Legend of Zelda and Tomb Raider series, had about six months of development work before Insomniac's CEO, Ted Price, decided to cancel it as "the team wasn't feeling it", according to director Brian Allgeier. Now in 2001 and struggling with ideas, Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings proposed the idea of "an alien that travels from planet to planet, collecting weapons and gadgets", an idea inspired by Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbes and by Marvin the Martian. This idea inspired the team since it would allow them to create new worlds and characters to develop.
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