After topping the charts in both the UK and Australia, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Greg Phillips announced today that Ratchet & Clank for PlayStation 4 is the fastest selling game in franchise history.
“So as all of you hopefully know by now, the Ratchet & Clank movie hits theaters today,” he said in a new post promoting the movie. “The game based on the movie (based on the game) launched on April 12 to rave reviews and has been our fastest selling Ratchet & Clank game to date.”
Phillips then explained the film’s origins, which began in early 2013 when the first test footage was passed around Insomniac Games. Created by Rainmaker Films and Blockade Entertainment, who wanted to make a movie based on the series, the footage “showed a tremendous amount of promise, and at that moment we all knew we might be sitting on something special.”
After seeing the video, Insomniac Games began talking with PlayStation “about how cool it might be to have a game available when the movie came out.” They were finishing up Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus at the time, “so it was a conversation with an eye to what we could do to have a game ready for the launch of the film.”
Then, in January 2014, one scene of the film was done, which takes place about five minutes into the movie where Ratchet shows an old man how he upgraded his ship:
As soon as we all saw this scene, the movie went from “This has a lot of potential” to “Oh, wow, we’re gonna pull this off!” It was at that point discussions on the game picked up in earnest. The film was returning to the beginning to tell Ratchet’s origin story, and we decided we would do the same on the game side. The film was going to introduce Ratchet to an all new audience and our goal for the game was to try to do the same by celebrating everything that made previous Ratchet & Clank games great. After a short discussion, we realized we had the perfect way to unify the stories: by having the game narrated by the ever truthful, never would lie about a thing, Captain Qwark!
As the game and film continued to develop, it was great to see the collaboration between teams. Rainmaker would share early cuts of the film and a small group of people that included folks from Rainmaker, Insomniac Games, and myself would go over everything and suggest improvements.
Did you buy the game earlier this month? Do you plan on seeing the movie?
[Source: PS Blog, PlayStation Australia]
