For 19 years, this Ratchet & Clank game was "a holy grail for probably 14 people," but after 6 years of preservation efforts it's no longer lost media

Way back in the '00s, cell phones still had buttons, and the idea of playing a game on one seemed like a pretty endearing novelty. An oft-forgotten spin-off of Insomniac's beloved platformer series called Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile got a strong reception when it launched in 2005, but its sequel – titled Clone Home and set to launch in 2006 – never saw the light of day.

For years, series fans wondered if Clone Home ever existed in a playable form, since the only evidence that it ever existed came from a handful of screenshots and some brief descriptions of its premise in the media. A 2019 video from YouTuber The Golden Bolt, citing information from one of Going Mobile's original developers, helped kick off a long-running hunt for any concrete trace of Clone Home's existence.

Well, folks, Clone Home has been found. Not just as a playable prototype or broken development build, either – a full version of the game, playable from beginning to end, has been discovered and uploaded to Archive.org. Some bugs and balancing issues suggest that the game was not fully ready for launch, but it was darn close.

The Lost Ratchet & Clank Game Has Been Found - YouTube

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The Golden Bolt explains a whole lot about both Clone Home's content and the quest to find it in a new YouTube video, but in short, "it took years of elbow grease [and] a decent amount of money on buying very specific 20-year-old models of duplicate phone." The process was led by Emily and Super Gamer Omega Clank, a pair of college kids because, of course, "who else has time to look for Clone Home besides college kids?"

Buying old cell phones in bulk and hoping that some piece of lost media is the only way these sorts of games get preserved, but this presented a special case. Clone Home was never actually released, which makes the idea of stumbling upon the game on a random old phone seem pretty outlandish.

Yet it seems Clone Home might actually have been released at some point – just briefly and accidentally. Rumors stretching back to an old forum post from an Insomniac community moderator suggested that, in the early '10s, "Clone Home was sent to cell phone providers and accidentally got released by an even smaller number of those networks for the briefest of periods."

Now that Clone Home has actually been found, that rumor suddenly sounds pretty plausible. The Golden Bolt has reached out to contacts at Sony and Insomniac, and while nobody wanted to comment on the record, some of them "privately shared that they're excited by this news." So much for nobody wanting to play that old game, huh?

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart remains among the best PS5 games out there.