User blog:Tenbeat/Sly Cooper's Father's Name Is...

Hey, you thiefy-thieves you,

It's official. Really official. And in fact, it has been official for over five years now. Sly Cooper's father's name is... Conner Cooper. Yep. With an "e." Crazy, right?

Where did I get this information? Don't worry, it's all legit. But I'm not gonna tell you.

ONLY JOKING. A few days ago, I bought The Sly Collection Official Strategy Guide from Amazon. It arrived this morning. Why did I buy it? Well, I want as much Sly Cooper merchandise as I can get my hands on, but I also remembered somebody saying something about Sly's father being named in it. However, I couldn't find the post that said this.

Anyway, when it comes down to it, page 280 states Sly's father's name in bold. Could it really be Conner Cooper? I couldn't believe it. It had to be misinformation! I had previously researched where the name Conner (or Connor, sometimes) came from, and while I could never find the first occurrence, it seemed to originate on the internet around 2003. That's one year before Sly 2: Band of Thieves came out. What materials could Sucker Punch have released to the public that had the name Conner in them? I don't know.

And in fact, I don't think that they did. I think that the name originally was a fan name. Here's what I assume happened.
 * Some lucky fan fiction writer created the name around 2003.
 * The Sly Collection was in development in 2009, and Sony needed a Strategy Guide written. Who do they go to? BradyGames, of course.
 * The writers for the guide started work sometime in 2009. The article originally known as "Sly's Father" was renamed on the Sly Cooper Wiki on the dark day of February 22, 2009 to "Conner Cooper." (It was eventually changed to "Connor Cooper" in 2010.) The article was mis-named (we all assumed) until June 7, 2012, when it was changed to the general name of "Sly Cooper's father." And that's how it has stayed for over three years.

But the damage was done. The writers at BradyGames had come here sometime in 2009 or 2010, and read that Sly's father's name was Conner. So it was put in the book. Misinformation created information. The fans did something for the Sly Cooper universe.

Now of course, that's all speculation on my part, but when you get down to it, it doesn't really matter. Sly Cooper's father's name is Conner Cooper. I emailed Prima Games (another strategy guide company that now owns BradyGames) with my concerns, spelling out in great detail what this meant, and I got this response:

"Hi Mark, The word "Official" means that the content has been licensed by the game publisher for Brady Games to use, and that they approve of the content disclosed in the guide."

- Will, from Prima Games Support

With that single sentence, history has been forever changed. OK, maybe not, but at least writing about Sly's father, I mean "Conner" (remember the "e"), won't be so awkward.

Teenbat, bureaucrat for the Sly Cooper Wiki