March Update: Making the Sly trilogy retrospective

Hey gang!

First off, a huge thank you for your patience concerning the newest video. I nearly didn’t think I would have it done at all, but I was determined to get it as close to the deadline as possible so as to keep up the habit. I hope it was worth it in the end- as you can see, this was something of a big undertaking.

I got the idea to finally cover the games in January- I had plans, always, to talk about them eventually, but the place I was moved out to in February gave me the perfect opportunity to sit and study exactly what was happening in all 4 titles. I made a lot of notes, cross referenced with a few friends, and then went in hard on the research. The last part took an extremely long time to cover- there is no single place for comprehensive information on Sly’s creation, hundreds of articles and notes are scattered on the web explaining the processes and a lot of them exist on now defunct websites. Even the games credits are slightly unhelpful- there are very few roles assigned to names, the company often listed as one big blob of people, so it took me a while to comb through the list and get a feel for who was really doing what. There are still some revelations to come that I want to fill in on in the next video.

I also had, at that point, wanted to simply talk about the games for a single video, and just discuss the story. I figured there’d be less to say about 1, and loads to say about 2. It turned out it would have been impossible for me to do so and to do it justice this way- 1 lays so much of the groundwork of what’s to come and is so radically different to 2 and 3 that it needed a more precise set of breakdowns to adequately emphasise just how good the sequels were. Once I had that down, the video production and increased research began to speed up.

I have some regrets. There are certain details I wanted to expand on and properly talk about, like how China was originally the first level of the game, the ability to tiptoe behind guards, the hubs vs the levels, but it all just didn’t come to me until I had the existing recording done. There were so many additions and addendums I ended up making- I rewrote a lot of the second half of the video as new research showed up and when I realised how I wanted to critique the issues with Murray. I’m glad it was so hectic though- I think it will focus me for the next video now that so much research has been done and so many memorable mistakes have been made. (turns out I CAN’T actually verify Carmelita being inspired by Salma Hayek. In a frantic bit of searching, I found her picture and thought oh, striking resemblance, I guess that thing I read must be true. I had forgotten that what I read a week ago and forgotten to come back to had come from TV tropes!) 

Anyway, thank you again for your support and your kindness. It has been such a wonderful feeling seeing people’s reaction to the video, and I feel that Patreon has offered me the chance to work harder rather than coast. For as good as you may think this is, I want to give you even better content come the sequels. Part of the reason I’m doing some other videos is because I want to train up a bit and keep diversifying my ways of making content and avoid fatigue on a single topic. Hoping that leads to a much better video when I eventually come back to Sly- but don’t fret about that being long away. I’ve already been writing and planning how that video will go down, and have a lot of research out of the way.

The next few videos are also looking good- two are in their final draft stage, the other two are being written as we speak. I’ll try not to leave you all hanging, especially as the next one is, honestly, not a particularly long one. You’ll see what I mean soon. It’s a err…bit of a curveball.

Take care everyone, and see you again soon!

-B