text: History Following the development of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, the third installment of the Spyro series, Insomniac Games wanted to move into a new intellectual property, since the Spyro series was owned by Universal Interactive Studios. With the PlayStation 2 recently announced in 2000, Insomniac began to prototype ideas for games on this new console. One, called Monster Knight, never got past the prototyping stage, while a second, called Girl with a Stick and aimed to be a mashup of The Legend of Zelda and Tomb Raider series, had about six months of development work before Insomniac's CEO, Ted Price, decided to cancel it as "the team wasn't feeling it", according to director Brian Allgeier. Now in 2001 and struggling with ideas, Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings proposed the idea of "an alien that travels from planet to planet, collecting weapons and gadgets", an idea inspired by Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbes and by Marvin the Martian. This idea inspired the team since it would allow them to create new worlds and characters to develop. Artists sketched a number of concepts for this alien character, which was originally reptilian, but ended up as a new species they called a "Lombax", a name Price had come up with. Along with this character they named Ratchet, they gave him a robotic companion, Clank. Originally developed as a childlike version of the Star Wars character C-3PO, they later decided that Ratchet and Clank should work instead like a buddy cop film, and made Clank an equal to Ratchet.