Trivia / Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando

• Blooper:
  • The first line from the Thug Leader on Endako is "Greetin's, morons!" However, even though Clank isn't required to reach this cutscene, the Thug Leader's line is in the plural anyway.
  • The scoreboards showing the top 10 racers' times when finishing a hoverbike race have two "8th Place" positions, with one replacing 9th.
• Christmas Rushed: The game had a surprisingly tight period of development compared to the previous game, having three months preproduction and nine months of full production. Surprisingly, the final game doesn't show many signs of being rushed or unpolished in spite of this.
• Creator Backlash: One of the original Ratchet & Clank programmers, T. B. Trzepacz, has stated that they were quite upset with the game's setup for the story.
• Creator's Pest: Per word of Mike Stout, the dev team didn't particularly like Angela Cross, mainly because they found her to be a very hard character to write for and were rather dissatisfied with how the execution of her character turned out, hence why she vanished from the sequels.
• Cross-Cast Role: When disguised as the Thief, Angela Cross is voiced by Rodger Bumpass, but when she's unmasked, she is voiced by Kath Soucie.
• Cut Song: In addition to the song used on Todano in the final game, there was also another track seemingly intended for the interior areas of the level. While this track still exists in Going Commando's files and was used in the E3 trailer of the game, it doesn't play ingame, and the whole of Todano uses the first song.
• Manual Misprint: A minor example. Page 26 of the manual has Ratchet shooting the Heavy Lancer at the Thug Helicopter on Endako, but the gun's projectiles are blue rather than the final game's orange.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • When you meet Angela on Grelbin, she mentions Yeedil having "nasty orbital defenses". This was meant to tie in to a final Star Explorer level that occurred there, but in the final game the orbital defenses are nil and you can just land on Yeedil without hazard.
  • At the end of the game, it was originally going to be revealed that the Protopets are weak to water. This is referenced in a room in the final level, Yeedil, that has a floor made of ice that you can melt into water with the Thermanator, killing several Protopets on it. However, the "weak to water" plot point was removed from the story, making this room come off as a weird Non Sequitur since the Thermanator has no other uses but melting ice and freezing water, and it doesn't solve any puzzles or help with traversal in this room, unlike every other time you used it before.
• The Other Darrin: This game replaced Mikey Kelly with James Arnold Taylor as Ratchet's voice actor. This wasn't a bad thing, though, for fans preferred James' performance enough that he would become the voice actor for Ratchet in all future games, and even the film adaptation of the first one.
• Throw It In!: According to an interview, the dev team actually knew about the First Person Wallclimb glitch, but they decided to treat it like Earn Your Fun and left it in since it can only be done after unlocking Challenge Mode, thereby meaning the player has already experienced the game at least once and seen the plot through.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Captain Qwark wasn't going to be the villain of the game, or even in the game at all. He was added in midway through development via the Behind The Hero cutscenes because the staff had grown to like him and missed the big lug, and it eventually culminated in them making him the actual villain of the game.
  • One of the original Ratchet & Clank programmers, T. B. Trzepacz, revealed on YouTube ^note See the comment section that they had pitched a version of Going Commando that was substantially different from the final game, though a couple of his ideas were broadly worked into it.
    • Instead of Ratchet and Clank being bored layabouts in the beginning, they were immediately approached by a female scientist who warns of a plot by a corporation called Megasoft to take control of all of the robots in the universe. Facing a public that is blind to the problem unfolding right in front of them, R&C travel around trying to enlist various factions to help them.
    • One group are the Xunil are a group of monastic bearded hackers who are a too lost in their own mysticism to be of much use at first. The second group are the Mapricot, an erudite and haughty cult that promises aid, but ultimately betrays them to Megasoft.
    • The game would also introduce a new character named Bug who gets very small and goes inside computers and machines to solve puzzles and clear the way forward.
    • Ratchet and Clank also start to build a larger spaceship that their tiny ship docks to. It starts with just a cockpit and a cargo module, and as they progress, new modules could be added to it that actually become locations where they can go, akin to building a stronghold in Morrowind. There would also be sections where you have to go outside and fix stuff on the ship (sometimes during battle, to give the Magneboots more time to shine, ala Sundog Frozen Legacy.)
    • There was also going to be a section that implemented a courier delivery game in one of the city levels using the grappling gun, slightly akin to Crazy Taxi.
    • Some of the levels that were polluted in the original game (i.e. Orxon) could be returned to and you could play them in restored beauty, or in the process of being cleaned up.
    • The end of the game was going to be a big strategic space battle, where you not only shoot ships, but also have to send your various forces around the galactic map to fight Megasoft's enslaved robot spaceship army.
  • The Thug Leader giant robot fight late in the game was originally going to be a chase sequence, with Ratchet using a speeder while shooting back at the robot while it was chasing them throughout the city, but it was cut due to being out of place in the game, and lacking any strong firepower. It was replaced with Ratchet fighting it on foot and using nearby turrets to bring it down. Also, the robot was initially going to have an even bigger health bar, but it was shortened because the fight was long enough as is.
  • There were at least five scrapped weapons: the Hound of Doom, the Laser Linked Mines, an item called the Fireboots and a turret upgrade for the Hydropack called the Gunsled that allowed it to shoot underwater. The Youtube developer commentary for Going Commando revealed that the Rift Inducer weapon was originally planned to debut in this game and not Up Your Arsenal, but they either weren't able to get it working right or it was too overpowered at the time, so it was replaced with the Bouncer (Ironically, a major Game-Breaker as well). Going from a later beta disc, the Bouncer was originally going to be called The F.I.D.O.
  • Maktar Resort was originally going to be called Space Vegas, but they changed the name when they found out Las Vegas was a trademarked name.
  • The new Helpdesk Girl for this game was originally going to have a British accent.
  • Megapolis was originally going to have robot citizens traveling through tubes out of reach as you wandered around.
  • The crane puzzle on Megapolis was supposed to play out differently, but was changed for the final game. A small remnant of this is a permanently locked door (with nothing behind it) in the last segment, which they forgot to remove before the game went gold.
  • The first Clank segment on Megapolis was originally supposed to have a block puzzle involving combining the use of the Lifter Bot and Bridge Bot, but it was cut for being too complex to pull off.
  • The boss fight against the Thug Leader on Endako originally had audio for Clank and him bantering, but it was Dummied Out (likely because it isn't required to get Clank before fighting the Thug Leader).
  • There was supposed to be a third Clank segment for Yeedil that would have given prominent use of the Lifter Bot (which is used exactly once in the final game), but it never made it past the planning stages due to time and memory constraints.
  • Ratchet and Clank were originally going to have a PlayStation 2 that you could play or destroy in their Megapolis apartment, but it was changed to the Insomniac Game Pyramid due to Sony's TRC having a guideline that you couldn't have a PlayStation console in their games that you could hit or destroy. It was briefly replaced with an Xbox that you could destroy, but that got cut because Sony also has a rule that competing consoles can't show up in their games.
  • The Vukovar Tribesman on Barlow originally had a blocking action so they would take less damage, but it was cut because it was too hard to convey it well to a player, and they died so quickly that it would've been pointless to add it anyway.
  • Because Tabora's map was designed to look like the head of Jimi Hendrix, there was originally a "Rave Cave" part of the level (meant to represent his hair pick), but it was removed from the final game.
  • An alpha build of the game shows that in the cutscene on Barlow where the duo meets a Desert Rider, Ratchet was originally going to threaten him with an unupgraded Lancer after he threatened Clank, hence the line "Touch him, and its plasma city!" The final changed it to Ratchet just using his wrench, making said line an Orphaned Reference.
  • Tabora was originally going to give you a Hoverbike to allow you to speed around the desert faster, but it was cut for time constraints.
  • The third Behind the Hero cutscene was originally going to have Qwark escape prison by chiseling his way out with his finely-tuned buttocks, but this gag was deemed too inappropriate, so they changed it to Qwark escaping by flushing himself down a toilet instead.
  • The R.Y.N.O. Salesman (who makes a cameo on Joba) and Slim Cognito were originally written to be the same guy, but were split up into separate characters for unknown reasons. They eventually became the same character in the 2016 reimagining of the first game.
  • The Levitator was originally going to have unlimited fuel, but it quickly became clear that it just wasn't that fun to use that way, and it broke the game way too easily on top of that.
  • The abandoned Megacorp mall on Oozla had a completely different track of music composed for it that was replaced by a more ironically kitschy and upbeat song in the final game.
  • The interior of the Megacorp Factory on Todano was going to have its own piece of music, but in the final game, the entire level uses the exterior's song. That said, the interior song was only Dummied Out and still exists in the game's files.
  • Grelbin was originally going to have a boss fight (similar to the helicopter fight on Megapolis) but it was cut because there was no memory left in the level to put it in. The Dummied Out Monstropedia image for it can still be found in the games files.
  • Angela swearing near the end of the game originally didn't have a censor bar covering her mouth as she swore, but the scene's animator did too good of a job with the lip sync, to where you could clearly lip-read her dropping the F-bomb, so the mouth movements had to be censored in the final game.

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