Sly Cooper and The Thievius Raccoonus - Development

Development

Brian Flemming of Sucker Punch called the rendering style as "Toon-shading", comparing the detailed backgrounds with cel-shading foregrounds to that of animated movies. An interview with the Sucker Punch development team identified that they took this route because "We wanted Sly and his world to look illustrated, but one step away from a flattened graphic style." To prevent slowdowns with framerates, the team "had at least one engineer working on nothing but performance for the entire development of Sly." The game art team "collected hundreds of photos and drawings of areas that looked like the worlds wanted to create" to generate the backgrounds. The characters themselves underwent up to "six or eight major revisions" before the designs were finalized.

The music was inspired by the artwork from the game; Ashif Hakik, composer of the game's music, stated that "Stylistic influences came from a combination of instrument choices and musical character defined and inspired by the locales in the game, and similar composer works like Yoko Kanno and her work on Cowboy Bebop, Henry Mancini, and Carl Stalling." He continued to note that "the interactive music engine we used made us consider the gameplay for each specific level a sort of starting point that would influence the way the music would be written."
There are two different covers for the game and they both have two different names, depending on location. Sly Raccoon in Europe and Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus in North America.