The following article contains spoilers for Ratchet & Clank (2002).
The original Ratchet & Clank is perhaps the game I feel the most nostalgia for. Or at least, it is the one that I feel the most nostalgia for the most consistently. It is not the first game I’ve ever played (see my articles on Crash Bandicoot or Jak & Daxter), but it was one of the first games I was able to play totally on my own. That sense of liberation was important to a young me, able to guide myself through a video game.
Ratchet & Clank is a 3D platformer with a sci-fi bent. Developed by Insomniac Studios, the game takes you to eighteen different worlds or astronomical bodies, and encourages you to smash and explore everything to find every world’s hidden secrets.
The promise of Ratchet & Clank is that you play as a funky, slightly off-kilter hero and travel from planet to planet in a bunch of cool spaceships. When I was very young, I had no concept of how video games were made. Not even slightly. So the subtle switch in framing from distinct levels (as you might find in Crash Bandicoot) to planets that you can go to from your ship was genius. It allowed me to live the fantasy of being in Star Wars, in a sense, going on an intergalactic journey. The distinction allowed me to imagine worlds beyond my own, and opened a gateway into science fiction that had previously only been accessible through Star Wars action figures.
The off-kilter hero of Ratchet & Clank is indeed the eponymous Ratchet, a fuzzy character of the Lombax species. At this point in the series, there was nothing special about Ratchet. No hidden destiny he had to fulfill. He was just a mechanic who dreamed about a life off world, much like Luke Skywalker dreamed of a life in the resistance. He is joined by Clank, a robot who does believe in the moral importance of his own mission – to stop his creator, Chairman Drek, from destroying the galaxy.
Drek was reportedly inspired by high-ranking executives met by Ted Price, the head of Insomniac, while they were making games with Universal. I didn’t know that for a very long time, but the sleaze and malice that oozes out of the guy is helped by Kevin Michael Richardson’s great voice acting job. “Form a line behind me, and kiss my – is this still on? Then turn it off you idiot!” I can hear his voice as I write the line down from memory. He is a memorable villain for a game focused on the depredations of extreme capitalism, and the resultant climate-related issues that are caused by it. Drek declares war on galactic civilization because he needs a new home for his people, but his corporation polluted the world they were on in the first place. This is the game’s final twist, and it makes perfect sense. The galaxy is so corrupt and money-hungry that no heroes are out to save it – it is really up to you.
The game’s writing shines, and in ways that its many, many sequels missed out on entirely. In this game, Ratchet is kind of abrasive. He has a noticeable edge to him, or even reluctance, to engage in heroics. He’s after fame for a lot of the game, and then at a certain point, is driven by petty vengeance. Only towards the end of the game is he driven by anything close to heroism. He and Clank fight a lot throughout the game. Unlike the amicable friendships and relationships between heroes in Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter (at the time, anyway), the relationship between Ratchet and Clank feels a lot more earned. We understand how they draw closer together, and why they’d want to be friends after the experience that we, the player, has guided them through.
Later games would make the assumption that their friendship is rock solid, but their relationship is never as interesting as it is in this game, where they don’t understand each other fully, and they are happy to go for low blows. Clank asks of one of the information delivery devices, “I wonder what that infobot is for?” Ratchet responds, “Maybe it can replace you.” This style of storytelling was apparently controversial at the time, which is why the original voice actor for Ratchet (Mikey Kelley) was replaced by James Arnold Taylor in all subsequent games. Even back then though as a little kid, I really liked it. It really gave me the sense that they were real. That they didn’t always get along or find the perfect solution to everything the first time around. They had flaws, but those flaws facilitated reconciliation and understanding. For a kids game, it had just the right level of nuance to get me on board. Later games in the series are still hugely fun, but the writing tends to lose some of what made the first game special by having Ratchet and Clank be on the same page about stuff most of the time.
The original game also differentiates itself by being not a deliberate third-person shooter. Instead, it is a platformer with a variety of purchaseable tools. You smash things and get bolts, the galaxy’s currency. Unlike later games, the original Ratchet & Clank is hugely stingy with its bolts, meaning every purchasing decision has a bit more weight to it (including ammo).
The tools do have the appearance and function of weapons, but there’s no real functional strafe or aiming system in the game. There’s also no upgrade system that encourages you to use the weapons you haven’t used, just to level them up for completion’s sake. Combat, then, isn’t all about how good you are at gunplay. Instead, it’s about picking the right tool for the right situation. Some tools are deliberately designed to be situational. The Taunter forces enemies to use a melee attack if they have one, and they’ll sprint towards you to do so – sometimes into lasers or forcefields. The Bomb Glove has a short range but a large blast radius, able to knock enemies off of platforms. The Visibomb (one of the coolest weapons in the series) is a rocket launcher that fires rockets with cameras attached to them. You can steer the rocket from a first-person perspective, using it to solve puzzles or snipe enemies. The Visibomb was also a vehicle for me as a kid to explore levels I was already intimately familiar with from new perspectives. I would use the Visibomb just to see if there were any secrets tucked away in places I couldn’t yet reach as Ratchet. Often, there were.
The game is filled with these inventive weapons, with only a couple of duds or boring tools. Ratchet & Clank encourages exploration with large gold bolts that can be found in secret areas, and Insomniac’s skill point system should really be in every game. It encouraged doing weird things with each level, or performing challenges. There was no hint as to what the requirement was beyond a vague name, so you’d just have to experiment.
If you’re familiar with me and what I like from my games, you have probably recognized that a lot of what I love about video games comes straight from Ratchet & Clank‘s design sensibilities. Combat that isn’t smooth and easy, gameplay that makes you think about where you’re going to jump, writing that isn’t plain and simple. There are some truly amazing levels that inspired my love of space (both outer space and just material space in general). Each level opens with a vista shot of the level or something impressive, a direct encouragement to go out there and explore it all. I could do a list of the best levels, but I think that’s dismissive of the need to actually go out there and play this thing. It’s a supremely confident, exciting game, with planet types that riff on mega-cities (Metropolis) to desolate mining areas (Aridia), all the way to planets covered in a sea of lava (Gaspar).
I would be remiss to finish this article without talking about the music by David Bergeaud. Bergeaud’s long-lasting impact on the playability and nostalgia present within the series cannot be understated. Every track feels sci-fi, ranging from bouncy tracks that push you on (Novalis, Aridia) to understated tracks emphasizing the hostility of an environment (Orxon) to arguably Bergeaud’s magnum opus, Gemlik Base. Gemlik Base opens with this striking vista of a hostile space station bristling with enemies and machine guns and ships, framed by an enormous, naked orange sun behind. You can imagine the feeling of hot and cold, the radiation, the distant isolation, the danger of the place, just from looking at that initial vista – and then the music kicks in. The game was (technically) remade in 2016, with the first game’s story remade for the movie and a bunch of the first game’s levels recreated for the PS4. It was criminal that none of the style of Bergeaud’s music was present (let alone the fact that Gemlik Base the level was cut from the remake). As I’ve discussed many times before, music is the thing that allows for a lot of our emotional register to be captured. The more we listen to the music, the more memories that music can potentially capture. So to have the soundtrack for the newer Ratchet games often just be orchestral, it feels like it flattens the potential for really interesting, unique soundscapes.
All this said, though, Ratchet & Clank is a stellar game, and remains pretty timeless in its presentation of a lived-in galaxy (much like the original Star Wars). It’s not available anywhere for purchase on modern systems to my knowledge, but I’d love for that to change. Surely a physical copy shouldn’t be too expensive, given the game was popular enough to earn PlayStation’s Platinum label back in the day. For those who are looking for a dose of adventure, humour, action, and incredible level design, there are still few better places to look than the original Ratchet & Clank.
Thanks to my parents for buying me this game, and inspiring in me a deep love of video games. Ratchet showed me the potential of video games, and continues to be a comfort to me when I’m feeling blue. There’s a lot I miss about being a kid, even while there is also a lot to enjoy about being an adult. The power of video games means I can always take some of that feeling of childhood wonder with me.
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