Board Thread:Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time discussion/@comment-97.94.233.244-20130223184118/@comment-4129066-20130224094918

Obviously Clockwerk tried to kill every single Cooper, but he always failed. Like he said in Sly 1: You Coopers always find a way to beat me.

So he never succeeded in killing any of the ancestors (at least before they got children, who then escaped) until with Sly's father, but he let Sly to live so he could prove that the Cooper Clan was nothing without the Thievius Raccoonus.

Sanzaru games probably didn't make the Clockwerk cameos canon. His appearance in the ice age might be just a plain cameo, nothing serious or even relevant to the plot. If Sanzaru desides to reveal the story of Clockwerk, they might not even take account the Sly 4 appearances, and just ignore them and rewrite the whole thing.

If the mysterious appearances in Sly 4 are meant to be serious and path-giving, then it is most likely that Clockwerk does have access to a time machine. However, he probably has a limited usage of it as he didn't go into the past to wipe out the first Cooper. Or he simply always failed.