Lost Ratchet & Clank mobile phone game "Clone Home" has been dumped and preserved
Mobile games from the 2000s are some of the most elusive and difficult titles to preserve and play in the modern era, mostly due to how niche most of these titles were, usually locked to either a specific region like Japan, locked to a specific kind of phones line (Nokia, Sony, etc.), or worse, having both regional and technological locks, making it much harder for the average user to experience these lost media games in the current landscape of gaming.
It's thanks to the great efforts of gaming and archival/preservation enthusiasts that games like these can live to see another day and be brought forth to the modern age of gaming, like Resident Evil: The Operations, by dumping these long forgotten titles and making them playable through modern emulators for older cellphone devices.
However, and as if there amount of region and technology hurdles weren't enough, there are some instances in which the game in question was never released for mobile devices in the first place, making it a legend and rumour about the game ever existing in the first place.
Such was the case with one of Ratchet & Clank's most obscure titles, titled "Clone Home", which was announced all the way back in 2006 as a Java (J2ME) game for mobile phones that many thought was another instance of a lost media videogame, given how it was announced but never came out.
Ratchet & Clank already has a successful release for mobile devices, with "Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile" releasing back in 2005. "Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home" was supposed to be the sequel to Going Mobile, announced in June 2006 and slated for a late 2006 release, but it didn't see the light of day, and news about it went silent, eventually falling into the "cancelled" category due to its lack of updates.
It wasn't until 2023 that YouTuber "The Golden Bolt" got in contact with two other members, Super Gamer Omega Clank (SGOC) and SuperSmasherEmily, to delve into the whereabouts of the long forgotten game, to try to track down what they could about the game, its development, and hopefully, a dump of the game, and after several efforts (and some money being spent on purchasing 20 year old mobile devices to test the modding software on), they managed to track down a person with the game installed on their 20 year old phone, after almost two decades of it being originally announced and never mentioned again, Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home was finally dumped successfully.
Alongside the dump, and given how the game was in a lost media status, some of the people involved, alongside other anonymous users, have provided a download for the full mobile game on proper archival websites, with proper guidance by the Video Game History Foundation and other sources as to how to properly handle the release of this lost media videogame into the internet.
The full cancelled "Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home" J2ME game is now available in a fully decrypted format, and can be played through J2ME emulators, but be mindful that download links cannot be shared.
