Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart devs look back on showcase game for Sony

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During the Dice Summit, I joined a group of journalists in the offstage winners’ room for the DICE Awards celebrating the best of video games in 2021 at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. Each group of winners filed through our room and we collectively tossed a bunch of questions at the winners.

Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart led the pack with four wins for Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Technical Achievement, and Family Game of the Year.

We met with Marcus Smith, creative director; Mike Daly, lead designer; Grant Hollis, art director; and Kevin Grow, lead animator. We asked them about their inspirations, creating a showcase game for the PS5, making a family game, the storytelling approach and a variety of other subjects.

Here’s an edited transcript of the press interview.

Question: When you went into this game, you had a lot of ideas about what kind of design direction it would take. What surprised you so much when you looked back and thought–either that was a very good idea when you started out, or that was a really bad idea, and you never want to talk about it?

Marcus Smith: I will say that when we first started doing alternate dimension versions of our characters, our first thought was, “We’ll do polar opposites.” If someone is very adventurous, somebody else has to be very cowardly. The problem is that very quickly we realized our characters are not just one-dimensional characters you can flip-flop. We spent all this time making these overly complex versions of anti-characters that ultimately didn’t work, and only ended up making our