A complete build of the canceled 2006 Ratchet & Clank game for mobile phones has been recovered by a group of enterprising fans.
Back in the mid-2000s, Sony pushed for mobile gaming installments to their flagship franchises.
One of those games was Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home, a 2006 J2ME smartphone game (the dominant platform before Android and iOS took over) starring Sony’s prolific, plucky pair.
The game never saw the light of day, having been canceled before release, but thanks to the work of some dedicated fans, a complete build of the game is now available and playable to the public.
In a video sharing the found media, YouTuber The Golden Bolt explains how the game has largely been accepted as lost media for the past two decades. Many assumed that the game was canned early on in development and a playable build never existed.
As is the case with so many topics this niche, the whole tale is much more interesting than simply “fans found the game on a phone”. As The Golden Bolt describes it, this finding is the result of years of effort from an entire community of speedrunners, hackers, and sleuths, who somehow tracked down the only known device in the entire world with a playable build of this little-known side game, broke through its encryption, and extracted the valuable code within. Watch the whole video below for the full fascinating story.
