Trivia / Ratchet & Clank (2002)

• Acting for Two:
  • David Kaye voices Clank, but he also voices Bob (Al's brother on Pokitaru), the Blarg Scientist in the Pilot's Helmet demonstration, and the scrap merchant on Oltanis.
  • Jim Ward voices Captain Qwark as well as the deserter on Batalia and the Gadgetron CEO.
  • Kevin Michael Richardson voices Drek while also serving as Qwark's bouncer and the enthusiastic announcer for a couple infobots.
  • Mona Marshall voices the Helpdesk Girl along with Helga and Edwina.
  • Neil Flynn plays a whopping six roles in the game—the Plumber, the Gadgetron Vendor salesman, Skid McMarx, Drek's Lieutenant, Fred, and the Foreman on Hoven.
  • Chad Einbinger plays Skid's Agent, the R.Y.N.O. salesman and the Jowai Resort owner.
• Breakthrough Hit: While Insomniac Games was already well known due to their successful Spyro the Dragon games, Ratchet & Clank is what really put them over the top forever.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Even Insomniac Games regretted making Ratchet such an unsympathetic character in this game, and worked hard to make him much more likable from the sequel onward.
  • Per Mike Stout, the dev team really regretted that they didn't give Ratchet a proper strafe function—they even considered implementing one, but were unable to due to the game being so late into development by then. This, the sequel (and every game in the series afterward) immediately rectified this.
  • During a livestream of the original game, Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price was curtly dismissive of the game's style of humor, dissing it as being "cringeworthy" and "juvenile" in hindsight.
• Orphaned Reference: On Kerwan, there's a random Swingshot target next to a building, which can be seen if you ride the train for long enough or take the taxi from the Gold Bolt area that you reach from Qwark's training course. Whatever purpose this served is unknown, as there's nothing special about the building and no ground to land on, so you simply fall into the bottomless pit and respawn like normal.
• Shrug of God: Even the dev team doesn't know what causes Ratchet to crash his ship on Novalis. They just wanted a reason for the player to not go back to Veldin until the end of the game.
• Throw It In!: If you look carefully at the bullets the giant gun in Aridia is firing, you can tell that its actually firing out robots—the same kind you fight in the level, no less. According to the developer's commentary, the level had no memory left for bullets for the gun to fire, so they used a model of the Flamethrower Bots you fight as a quick and easy solution, figuring nobody would notice.
• What Could Have Been: Has its own page.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The game was written by animation director Oliver Wade and lead rigger John Lally and there was no long term plan for the story or lore—the dev team just made up the characters and story as they went. For example, the opening cutscene was one of the last scenes made for the game, and it was put in so late in development that they didn't even have time to record new dialogue for it.
  Mike Stout: The stories on the first two games were very loose, yeah. We usually knew pretty early on what all our levels would be, and we’d have a general idea of the plot. By that point, though, we’ve usually made 6 or so levels — the level design team works ahead. So the levels that are already made get retrofitted into the story as best we can. The script itself usually got written pretty late, and we didn’t have a dedicated writer on staff until RC3 — so the scripts were written by people who were also doing other jobs. In the case of RC1 and 2, they were done by our animation lead Oliver (Wade) and one of the senior riggers, John (Lally). Starting in RC3, we had a writer on staff and the planning and writing could happen earlier and faster. But the real fruits of this first paid off on R&C Future. And now, all these years later, the terrific story work they did on Spider-Man (PS4) is a testament to how much the studio has grown in that area. That’s almost certainly true (the original story plan for R&C2 being very different from the final product). The stories got rewritten a lot. Since the cinematic didn’t come until later in the project there is some wiggle room there. Storyboards were done for every animated scene in those games — but I don’t remember doing storyboards for story development. A lot of games do that these days, but it was rare back then. We did a lot of animatics also, now that I think about it. Sliding around T-pose stuff. So maybe not every scene was storyboarded. It was nice because once you nail the blocking you can just add details on. Usually the faces and mouth sync would get done first, then the rest. But it’d all build on the animatic.
• Working Title: The Adventures of Ratchet and Clank.

---