Sly Cooper

Sucker Punch had made exactly one game, Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the Nintendo 64, when it started on Sly, soon after Rocket shipped in 1999; the project took three years. The studio called the look "toon-shading," detailed backgrounds behind cel-shaded characters, "one step away from a flattened graphic style." Sony's regional offices could not agree on what Sly should be, with America asking for cool, Japan for cute, and Europe for dark and edgy, and the character was nearly named J.T., for Jewel Thief, until someone worried about confusion with Japan Tobacco. The story: on his eighth birthday Sly was to inherit the Thievius Raccoonus, the Cooper clan's book of thieving techniques, but the Fiendish Five murdered his father and tore it apart. Raised in an orphanage with Bentley the turtle and Murray the hippo, he goes after each member, from a frog pirate in Wales to a bulldog gangster in Utah to Clockwerk, a mechanical owl in a Russian volcano, with Interpol's Inspector Carmelita Fox always one step behind. One hit takes Sly down, so you sneak, shimmy, and grapple with his cane, and every recovered page of the book teaches a new move.

Reviewers loved the look and the controls and dinged the length; Metacritic settled at 86. GameSpot nominated it for "Best Game No One Played on PlayStation 2" in 2002, which was fair at first (400,000 copies in the first year) and wrong by 2006, when the US total passed 800,000 and the trilogy 2.2 million. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (September 2004) made Bentley and Murray playable, gave everyone a health bar, and opened the levels into hub worlds; it scored 88 and was named Console Children's Game of the Year. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (September 2005) shipped with 3-D glasses in the box and was Sucker Punch's last; the studio moved on to Infamous.

Sanzaru Games remastered the trilogy as The Sly Collection in 2010 and made a fourth game, Thieves in Time, in 2013, then said in 2014 it was done. An animated film announced in 2014 for 2016 lost its animation studio in 2017, and a 52-episode TV series announced in 2017 never found a network. Sly survives as a PlayStation mascot: a fighter in PlayStation All-Stars, a "Cooper Clan Cosplayer" trophy in Ghost of Tsushima, and a 2024 re-release of the original on PlayStation 4 and 5.