The rumour mill is in full swing again and this time it’s PlayStation anti-hero Sly Cooper who is the subject of the tittle-tattle.
Things kicked off when it was noticed that Sucker Punch had renewed the Sly Cooper domain name. That in itself is not unusual, companies regularly hold on to domain names and trademarks years after games have been released and frequently renew them, I have lost count the amount of times Rockstar updated the “Agent” trademark.
Nick Shepsal from Xbox Era has then Tweeted “Ok…so, my source *has* given me the green light, but we’re still not 100% certain. But it’s believed that Pixel Opus (as many of you have guessed) possibly in collaboration with Sony Animation are the ones working on Sly. I also believe Sony Animation is on the cartoon project”
Tipsters AccountNGT then backed this up with another Tweet, “The next Sly Cooper is not developed by Sucker Punch”, and also stated “According to a source, for Sly, they are aiming for a reveal for the second half of 2022. Which makes sense since later this year is Sly’s 20th anniversary.”
There was also a Sly Cooper logo in a recent PlayStation promotional video, you can see it on the side of a wall at the 58s mark in the video below.
Sly Cooper was meant to get an animated film way back in 2016. That never surfaced and the film is still marked as In Development at IMDB.
While Sly has been around on PlayStation since 2002 he’s never been a really big character, certainly not as popular as a certain bandicoot. However, Crash is now owned by Activision which in turn is owned by Microsoft, meaning PlayStation’s favourite furry has defected to the other side and is unlikely ever to appear on the console again.
A new Sly title would also tie in with the long established pattern of games during each console generation. The first games are always the big hitters for the hardcore, your Killzones, your Horizons, that sort of thing, but as the consoles start becoming accessible to more people then Sony start pushing family friendly content.
We may even get a look at the game in tonight’s State of Play, so stay tuned for that.
