Board Thread:General Sly Cooper/@comment-1845428-20170128203011

This theory is pretty far-fetched, but hear me out. (There's a TL;DR at the bottom.)

I was going through Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time again a few days ago, and I played through the job "Rug Rats" from 40 Thieves. It's one of the three jobs where the objective is to save a member of Salim's gang; in this case, The Panther. You head through Honest Hassan's Carpets and drop a large pallet of rugs onto a weak part of the floor, breaking through to the caves below. While I was down there, I noticed something: bones. Nothing too abnormal; you are in an ancient cave system full of deadly scorpions, there are bound to be some skeletons.

But these were human bones. And not just a rib cage or something ambiguous like that. Skulls. Human skulls. I don't know if you've ever compared human skulls to any other animal, but they don't look the same. Not even our closest relatives, apes. Why would there be human skulls in this cave? Was it an oversight on Sanzaru's part? Perhaps. It's even somewhat likely. But it's also possible that it was deliberate. I'm not saying that Sanzaru has the same weird idea that I have (though maybe they do), but more likely some 3D modeler or concept artist was like "Hey, let's put some human skulls down here, just as a sort of Easter egg."

I read a theory by GameInformer about how Sly Cooper is an Assassin from the Assassin's Creed series, and while I don't believe it (pretty silly, but it makes you wonder how many ideas were taken from Sly Cooper by the Assassin's Creed series, like the paraglider), it did spark the thought of a post-human world. In the Sly is an Assassin theory, our human world ended and animals took over, creating their own history and evolving to near-human intelligence, and Sly is an unknowing member of the animal branch of Assassins.

Remove the bit about the Assassins, and why not? It could explain several things: maybe humans, in a very Jurassic Park-like way, recreated dinosaurs from DNA. This would explain why dinosaurs exist only 12,000 years before the series takes place; there was no meteor to wipe them out. Perhaps the dinosaurs are even the reason why humans are gone. Maybe it was a whole thing with genetically modifying animals to make them more intelligent and, rats of NIMH-style, they got too smart for the their own good. Or the humans just couldn't survive the next ice age, for whatever reason.

I could go on, tying Clockwerk into it all (he was one of the first genetically modified non-dinosaur animals, and he used his new intelligence to replace his body with robotic parts created by the humans, and then perhaps started the war between the humans and animals), but I'll leave that for another time.

TL;DR. Humans genetically modified animals and created dinosaurs, and were subsequently wiped out by the naturally predatory creatures that now had near-human or human intelligence (unless humans simply didn't survive the next ice age). This is why dinosaurs exist much later in the Sly universe; this is a second generation of dinosaurs never wiped out by the meteor. Remnants of humans still exist, such as the skulls in the caves of Arabia and the pyramids. Clockwerk was one of the first genetically modified animals, and he used his new intelligence to replace his body with robotic parts, and possibly is the creature that started the human-animal war.

This also begs the question; how were the second-gen dinosaurs wiped out? A dinosaur-mammal/avian/reptile war? (Yes, I know that dinosaurs are reptiles, but they are the Terrible Lizards and they make their reptilian brethren look bad.) 