Insomniac’s Ryan Schneider says that a lot of the concepts behind Super Mario Galaxy come directly from the Ratchet and Clank series. He didn’t say, "steal," but that the game was heavily "influenced," by the R&C games.
"There’s evidence all around us I think, of certain games that have borrowed from Ratchet and Clank. One that we’re even extremely flattered by is Super Mario Galaxy, with their spherical worlds; we did spherical worlds in Going Commando, and Up Your Arsenal.
"It would be amazing to think that Miyamoto-san thought that was so cool that he wanted to incorporate it into Mario Galaxy. Granted, he’s doing it in a different way, but it’s still a spherical world, so it’s flattering to see those sorts of things."
Now before we get too full of ourselves, it should be pointed out that many elements of game play in the Ratchet and Clank franchise are also strikingly similar to the Crash Bandicoot series.
As for the spherical world concept, we saw a hint of that in Kingdom Hearts during the various journeys from planet to planet.
When all is said and done, the game industry is a much inbred community of ideas and concepts that are seamlessly passed along from one game developer to another. Everybody does it, and you can’t complain or get flattered by someone else "taking" your idea simply because, for all practical purposes, the whole game industry engages in such actions.
So for the meanwhile, we can all be happy that we have Ratchet and Clank plus Super Mario Galaxy to play with…no matter who thought up the game play design ideas first.
[via kotaku]
