Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart 20th Anniversary Armor Sets Available, Old Games Joining PS Plus Premium & Staff Messages

Sony and Insomniac Games have announced a plethora of Ratchet and Clank news for the franchise’s 20-year anniversary. Firstly, the latest game in the series, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, has received the following five free armor packs celebrating previous games:

• Commando Armor inspired by Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
• Holoflux Armor inspired by Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
• Quest Armor inspired by Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
• Marauder Armor inspired by Ratchet: Deadlocked
• Clank Armor to celebrate the greatest of pals

Further, the following games will join the PlayStation Plus Premium lineup on November 15, 2022:

• Ratchet & Clank (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: Deadlocked (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)

The Ratchet and Clank titles currently available via the service are listed below:

• Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault (PS3)
• Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus (PS3)

I’m not gonna lie, this would be far more exciting if they weren’t tied to cloud streaming and instead received native ports, but I digress.

Next, several lengthy staff messages were shared to commemorate the occasion. The President of Insomniac Games, Ted Price, shared the following statement:

“When we were in early production on the original Ratchet & Clank in 2001, we were trying to find the right tone for the story. Brian Hastings had come up with the core concept for the game and we had moved quickly into prototyping. The tricky part was finding the right comedic flavor for our scenes.

As someone who’s incapable of writing humor, I was waiting anxiously to see if Brian, John Lally and Oliver Wade who had been collaborating on the scripts could thread the needle and find something that was laugh-out-loud funny without being slapstick.

I remember a bunch of us crowded around an old CRT TV watching our first test cinematic. It was the ad for Al’s Roboshack where Captain Qwark (voiced by the great Jim Ward) states in his typically snarky tone “There’s nothing worse than staring down a Blargian Snagglebest…from the inside”. Even though I knew the script by heart, after watching the scene I laughed out loud. The lines, the delivery, the animation, the subtle social commentary – everything fit. To me, that ended up being the scene that set the comedic tone for the entire franchise.”

The Head of Creative Strategy at Insomniac Games, Brian Hastings, shared the following message:

“I remember the first time I did a hoverboard half-pipe jump on a spherical world and saw the tiny planet receding in the distance below me. That was midway through development of the first Ratchet game, and it was one of many moments that made me think “wow, we’ve got something really special here.” Funny thing is, as amazing as the spherical worlds were, we ended up deciding to save them for the sequel.

Two other favorite moments that did make the cut: sucking up a whole nest of sandsharks with the Suck Cannon and blasting them back out at each other, and the first reveal of Metropolis on Kerwan when you walk through the tunnel and see the sprawling city and rivers of air cars in front of you. But there are at least a hundred other unforgettable moments from the making of that first game I could pick. That first year was a magical period of time where every day somebody was adding something new and incredible into the mix.“

The Senior Art Director at Insomniac Games, Jacinda Chew, shared the following message:

“I started at Insomniac when we were making ‘Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando’ for the PS2. We used to name all the assets by number, so there were no letters in any of the asset names. Artists would write long lists of numbers with a description of what the asset was for their own reference.

When you wanted to share an asset, you’d ask the artist for the number or use a copier machine to make a copy of their asset lists for your own use. Designers also made level maps in Illustrator that artists would print out on large rolls of paper to use as guides for building levels. Concept art was done on paper and handed to the artists. Needless to say, artists’ desks were covered with piles and piles of paper even though we were modeling in 3D.“

The Head of Technology at Insomniac Games, Shaun McCabe, shared the following message:

“Initially, he thought I’d sent him a shot from the feature film as a joke. Then he thought I’d sent him a shot from one of our pre-rendered cinematics. Eventually, though, he got it: it was an in-game frame captured on the PlayStation 4 console.

The producer was so amazed by what he saw that he forwarded the screenshot to folks within SIE Europe, who in turn forwarded it to others. Pretty soon, word spread that Ratchet & Clank (2016) wasn’t a remaster but instead, something completely new.

RCPS4 would go on to become our most successful title in years and reinvigorated the Ratchet & Clank franchise within the PlayStation community!“

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is available on PlayStation 5. Check out our review.