After 19 years, those who love Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank are finally able to play a "lost", cancelled entry in the series, which has previously been described online as "a holy grail for 14 people", as recently spotted by the folks at Gamesradar.
Back in 2006, Sony's mobile arm announced Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home, a Java-based follow-up to the Insomniac duo's first mobile platformer Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile.
Similar to Going Mobile, this was being designed to be a 2D platformer, but was described at the time by IGN as featuring "more weapons than Going Mobile" as well as "some solid [graphical] tweaks". The game was reportedly slated to release later that same year in September, but was eventually cancelled, with rumours circulating on the Insomniac message boards later on, alleging that it may have seen an accidental release in Canada before being pulled.
The Golden Bolt, a Ratchet & Clank video essayist and YouTuber, was the first to share the news of the game's discovery yesterday in a video, attributing its remarkable unearthing to a group of community members (including SGOC and SuperSmasherEmily). They had been working for years to uncover and dump the game, based on a lead he had provided in an earlier 2019 video, on Going Mobile, before pooling their efforts together in 2023.
As a result of their hard work, Clone Home is now available to download from archive.org, with SuperSmasherEmily providing the world's first full playthrough of the title online.
According to The Golden Boot, he has reached out to staff at Sony and Insomniac about the discovery, though no one would comment on the record. Nevertheless, the impression he got is that some people internally are "excited" to see this previously lost piece of Ratchet & Clank history come to light.