Sly Cooper celebrates 20 years today

blog.playstation.com:

Happy 20th birthday, Sly Cooper! Today we are so happy (and a little bit shocked) to celebrate the 20-yearanniversary of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus! Where does the time go? Originally shipped on September 23, 2002 for PS2, this was Sly’s original adventure (known as Sly Racoon in some parts of the world) and our studio’s first-ever PlayStation game!

Before we ready our party hats and cake, we have some brand new Sly Cooper merchandise to reveal today to celebrate the milestone. But first we wanted to look back on Sly’s legacy across the whole franchise and share memories from some of our team who helped shape Sly Cooper into the series we know and love, back when some of them had a little more hair or a little less gray in it:

Doing level design for Sly 1 was a great learning experience. From prototyping using LEGO for the Muggshot rooftop to countless level iterations that took place to get the feel and gameplay just right. I remember so many different variations of levels I worked on that even when I play it now I can be surprised at what the final versions are!

Sly 1 was our first BIG game, and there were multiple milestones where the game was very clearly at risk of getting canceled. To me, the biggest breakthrough was the milestone we invented the “Binoc-u-com” where Bentley and Sly would hatch plans – but really it was a great way to give the player directions without it feeling ham-fisted.

At the time we were building Sly, so many games had been pushing the visual execution bar upwards in their cutscenes – way beyond what we were capable of at the time. One of our best decisions was to reverse that trend and make our cutscenes more graphic instead—which gave us something distinct and unique, but also