What Could Have Been / Ratchet & Clank

An early design for Ratchet.

Pre-Ratchet & Clank

• Before Ratchet & Clank and after the development of Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, one of Insomniac Games' concepts for a PlayStation 2 game was Monster Knight, a third-person adventure game described as Pokémon mixed with The Legend of Zelda where you capture, grow, and defeat monsters and utilize them as weapons and armor. This idea predates Monster Hunter. The idea never made it past the planning stages, but some of the RPG mechanics were used for later games.
• Another concept was codenamed I5 (Insomniac Game #5) a.k.a. Girl with a Stick. The developers, however, were never enthusiastic about the game, so the idea was dropped after six months.

Ratchet & Clank (2002)

• Ratchet went through several different early designs, one of which was even shorter than he ended up in his final design, and one that was more cat-like. Clank was originally supposed to be three floating spheres, each with an individual personality, but they ultimately decided it would be too difficult to keep the personalities from competing for attention (not to mention they looked aesthetically terrible on Ratchet) so they condensed them all into Clank.
• Ratchet was originally going to be brown, but a representative from Sony Japan told Ted Price that they didn't think his look worked and suggested he be yellow and have stripes on his ears. Ted was aggravated about it at first, but realized the look worked better when somebody applied the suggested redesign anyway.
• They designed at least 70 weapons and gadgets before scaling it down to thirty, so there were some scrapped weapons that didn't make the cut in the original game. Some of the most notable ones include a drill weapon called the Revolverator that was difficult to program and was simply not enjoyable to use (but it makes a cameo in-game as a prop used by the miner on Hoven), and a Giganto Ray and Shrink-O-Ray weapon that only appeared in promo images for the game; some of these scrapped weapons even managed to sneak onto the cover of the game. Another scrapped weapon was the Mackerel 3000, a gadget that would replace Ratchet's wrench with a giant fish, but it was scrapped because they couldn't get it to animate well.
• Chairman Drek was going to sound very different at one point in early development, according to an unused audio file in an early demo.
• According to an unused audio file from Big Al, in an early beta you would be given upgrades such as the Heli-Pack from places where you purchased weapons and gadgets already, possibly where you would get the Thruster Pack upgrade.
• Planet Rilgar apparently went through two other names in development; the files for the E3 demo have it listed as "Talos", while its Infobot has Darla Gratch call it Planet Blackwater. The latter name is referenced in the final game by Blackwater City, the name of the city on Rilgar.
• The Hydrodisplacer and Hologuise gadgets had different designs early on.
• The Walloper was originally red to make it look more like a boxing glove, but it's gray in the final game.
• There was also a scrapped Hydra miniboss fight for Pokitaru, which was replaced with Ratchet just fighting the local wildlife on a boat.
• The most notable cut from the original game was an unnamed "Water Planet", complete with its own boss battle as well as a Jetski gadget for that level.
• Drek's Lieutenant was originally going to be a boss fight on Eudora, but they didn't have time to complete his animation, so they reduced him to what amounts to a joke in a cutscene. He was also meant to smoke a more realistic cigar, but it was changed when the developers found out it would've gotten the game an M rating.
• Going by commercials and beta footage, the Devastator was originally going to damage Ratchet if a missile detonated at point-blank range, and the Tesla Claw was originally going to lift enemies right into the air. The Thruster Pack's Stretch Jump was originally going to damage enemies as well.
• According to the developer's commentary, the giant gun on Aridia was originally going to shoot you up to a spherical world, but the dev team just didn't have enough time to make it work, so they replaced it with a Gold Bolt. The sequel would get the spherical world idea working properly.
• Batalia was originally set in broad daylight in the beta, while the final game has it set during a storm.
• Another notable scrapped idea is the "Cutscene Gun", a Joke Weapon that was so overpowered that it would literally break the game—as in, it flashes the screen, live action stock footage and orchestral music plays, and Ratchet would just end up stranded on an island, forcing the player to reset the game.
• There were originally going to be Hoverpack segments at one point in development. This idea would eventually be revisited in the 2016 reimagining.
• Kalebo 3 was originally going to show an active hoverboard race going on below you as you progressed through the level, but this was dropped due to technical limitations.
• Raritanium was originally going to be called Unobtanium, but it was changed for unknown reasons.
• Captain Qwark was initially meant to be spelled as Quark, but was changed due to fear of trademark issues with another series with a character named Quark. They also figured it was perfectly in-character for Qwark to misspell his name anyway.
• Concept art shows that Giant Clank was originally going to have shoulder mounted missile launchers, but these were deemed impractical and the final game has him launching missiles out of his wrists instead.
• The original sand mice summoned could not fly; they would reward Ratchet with a lump sum of bolts upon meeting them, and would sometimes require the player to walk them to another sand mouse house before presenting a reward.

Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando

• 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, Tim Trzepacz, revealed on YouTube ^note See the comment section that he 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 called the Xunil are a group of monastic bearded hackers who are 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), a la 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 it's 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.

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal

• The game's original default control scheme was going to be a Lock-Strafe mode to make it clear that the game's focus was more on combat than platforming, but when players complained about the controls being abruptly changed from the previous games, they changed the controls back to normal, but included the Lock-Strafe controls as an option. The game's sequel, Ratchet: Deadlocked, would later make Lock-Strafe the default (but like UYA, it retained the other control schemes in the options menu).
• There were originally going to be racing courses, including one on Florana using the Turboslider, but this was cut due to development time constraints, but one of the unfinished tracks can be played via the Insomniac Museum, and a voice clip left in the game makes an offhand mention of the scrapped race course. The Hovership and Turboslider also had substantially different designs early on. There were also two beta Qwark vid-comics that didn't make the cut, but are still playable.
• The Qwark Vid-Comics were initially planned to be done in the style of the Mega Man X games, but a more traditional side-scrolling action platformer using the same graphics as the rest of the game was done instead.
• The game console was initially meant to be the Insomniac Game Pyramid from Going Commando, but it was replaced with the VG-9000 for unknown reasons. The IG game pyramid can still be found in the game's Insomniac Museum.
• The Galactic Rangers were original supposed to speak in a typical robotic monotone, but they eventually decided to give them more expressive voice acting.
• There was originally supposed to be a six-eyed Tyhrranoid enemy in the game, but it was cut for unknown reasons, presumably to save time and work.
• There was going to be another Reflector puzzle near the end of Marcadia, but the dev team, who already had trouble getting the other spider/laser puzzle to work, just couldn't figure out how to make it work, so they replaced it with a Titanium Bolt that needs the Gravity Boots instead.
• The Giant Clank boss fight was originally going to have a puppet-like Stylistic Suck approach to its look, but when it became clear it would've been too difficult to get working, they settled on a more standard giant monster model instead.
• The color for some of the HUD icons was originally going to be blue like in Going Commando, but it was changed to orange very late in development.
• Spaceship levels were initially planned to return and would've been done in the style of the Gummi Ship levels in Kingdom Hearts II, but they never got past the prototype stages because they were such a huge development time sink to make in the previous games. They were eventually featured in this style in Tools of Destruction.
• The Warp Pad was initially meant to be a much more flexible gadget which let you drop a teleport spot anywhere the player wanted, but it was added so late into development that there was absolutely no time to accommodate the game to keep it from being a game-breaking gadget, so it ended up being heavily nerfed to what amounts to a key used twice on the Thran Asteroid level.
• The part before you reach Qwark's bedroom was originally going to have a cutscene pointing out the crevice in the wall nearby, but it was so late in development that there was no time to animate it, so they programmed an in-game camera move to point it out instead.
• The Dr. Nefarious fight in Deja Q All Over Again was originally planned to be much more difficult, but was toned down because even the game's testers found him too hard to beat.
• The Hacker puzzles were meant to be harder as well, and were toned down for similar reasons as the above.
• The Mama Tyhrranoid fight went through some changes as well, and likewise got toned down in difficulty—for starters, you originally weren't going to be able to damage its turret once it lowers to fire at you.
• Unused audio found on Up Your Arsenal's disc reveals that a cutscene revealing Skidd was explicitly turned back to normal (and was on the news talking about it) was planned, but wasn't animated.
• Mike Stout briefly toyed with the idea of having Chairman Drek resurrected with some sort of hackneyed explanation, but the idea was immediately shot down by the rest of the dev team.

Ratchet: Deadlocked

• The initial idea for the game was Ratchet & Clank: NEXUS (not to be confused with the PlayStation 3 title Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus), but it only got to the concept art stage before it was cancelled and began reworking into Deadlocked.
• According to a podcast with developer Mike Stout, Deadlocked was also going to be a vehicular combat game in the vein of Twisted Metal, but one and a half months into development, Jak X: Combat Racing was announced and Insomniac thought it made no sense to release their own driving game right alongside it, so the game was heavily retooled into an on-foot combat game. The vehicles in the final game (the Hoverbike, Landstalker and Hovership) were a holdover from this version of the game. The story was also different too, and was rewritten a few times and wasn't finished until late in development.
• The initial retool of the game tried to make the gameplay an expansion of the battlefield missions in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, but with bigger maps, less linear gameplay and the ability to solve different objectives in the same mission. They tried it for a couple months, but they couldn't figure out how to make it work, so they once again retooled the gameplay to be more linear.
• There were originally going to be 12 weapons in the game instead of 10.
• Gold Bolts were considered to be put in the game at one point, but the extremely open nature of the level design made it extremely hard to hide them without reworking the levels all over again, and because the game was past beta stage at that point in development it was too late to add them anyway, so they were dropped and they simply put in more Skill Points to compensate for it.
• The hub area was originally meant to be larger and have NPCs in it, but time constraints forced it to be scaled down and simplified.
• Merc and Green (who were also holdovers from the scrapped Ratchet racing game) were supposed to have legs, but they couldn't get them to work due to issues with their pathfinding A.I. making them unintentionally obstructive to the player (i.e. you couldn't push them out of the way if they got between you and an enemy), so they made them hovering robots instead.
• There are cut voice lines hinting that Ace would have used flash-bangs and a morph-o-weapon (one of the signature weapon archetypes for the franchise, but never used by enemies) during his boss fight. Likely cut because they would have bordered on making him an SNK Boss.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

• Insomniac confirmed that they considered a title similar to "Rift Ya A New One", but dropped it.
• When designing Rivet, developers debated over whether or not she should exhibit more stereotypically feminine aspects, like wider hips and visible breasts.

Canceled Games

• Ratchet Racing: The initial idea for I8 and a fourth Ratchet game for 2005, this idea would be canned extremely early on when Insomniac learned that Naughty Dog was making Jak X: Combat Racing.
• Ratchet Nexus: not to be confused with the 2013 game with the same subtitle in Europe, the second I8 idea revolved around Ratchet and Clank picking sides in a planetary conflict, and was darker in tone due to the popular Halo franchise. Much like with Monster Knight's RPG ideas, Nexus' darker tone would influence the third and final idea: Ratchet: Deadlocked, and the idea of a game taking place on a single planet would later appear in 2011's All 4 One.

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