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So, a Kikizo interview with Insomniac Games's Ryan Schneider was doing the rounds a few months back, just before the release of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Kikizo: You've said that some inspiration is taken from games and movies, but have you found influences of Ratchet in other games?

Ryan Schneider: Yeah, I think that it's flattering... well OK, first of all, there was a PlayStation 2 game which I won't name, that was more or less a direct rip-off of Ratchet and Clank. 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.

Well, the guys at Official Nintendo Magazine UK decided to bring this up when interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto for an upcoming feature...

The story of what happened next comes to us courtesy of Mike Jackson at Computer and Video Games:

Miyamoto said he was "surprised" by Insomniac's comment. "In terms of the spherical worlds and anti-gravity," he went on to explain, "we had the original idea as soon as we finished the development of Mario 64 and had been experimenting with it for many years, even on the N64."

"It's not an idea we got from anywhere else," adds Miyamoto, before adding: "I'm sorry but I have to admit that I've never seen the game in question. Is it a PC game?"

Ouch.

Really, though, Schneider was asking for it with his original quote. You can find "spherical worlds" with funky gravity in video games as early as Yoshi's Island on the SNES. While I could start crafting a paranoid theory about how Ratchet & Clank is just an elaborate Yoshi's Island knock-off, I have the good sense not to.

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