Sly Cooper has never had a native PC release. Not a single entry in the franchise has ever officially launched outside of Sony hardware — every game in the series has been exclusive to PlayStation platforms, from the original PS2 trilogy through to Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time on PS3 and Vita in 2013. That changes thanks to a dedicated group of fans who have been quietly doing something remarkable: rebuilding the original game’s code from the ground up so it can run natively on PC.
The project is called Project Cane, and it’s targeting Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus — the 2002 PS2 original that launched the franchise and one of the most beloved platformers of that console generation. The team has released a working PC demonstration showing the “A Stealthy Approach” mission, complete with cutscenes and gameplay, running natively on PC. It’s early days, with no confirmed release date for a full build, but the proof of concept is real and playable.
What Project Cane Actually Is — And How It Works
Project Cane is a decompilation and native PC port project. It’s built on the foundation of a long-running open-source effort — hosted on GitHub under the repository TheOnlyZac/sly1 — that has been reverse-engineering the PS2 game’s code back into human-readable source code. The decompilation project’s stated goal is to “fully decompile the game engine to matching source code,” working from the North American version of the game (SCUS_971.98).
The critical detail that distinguishes this from simple emulation: the repository contains no original game assets or code. Players need to own a legitimate copy of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus to build and run the project. The team is rebuilding the engine — the underlying code that makes the game function — from scratch by studying how the PS2 executable behaves, then writing equivalent code that produces identical results. When that rebuilt engine is paired with the original game’s data files (which the player provides from their own copy), the result runs natively on modern hardware without needing a PS2 emulator like PCSX2 to sit in between.
This approach, sometimes called a “matching decompilation,” has become the preferred method for fan preservation projects across the industry. Projects like Ship of Haskell (Star Fox 64), sm64ex (Super Mario 64), Zelda64 Recomp, and numerous others have used the same methodology to bring classic games to PC natively. Project Cane is the first serious attempt to apply it to the Sly Cooper franchise.
Why “Native PC Port” Matters — It’s Not Just Emulation
PC players have technically been able to play the Sly Cooper games through PS2 emulation via PCSX2 for years. There are even community-made HD texture packs available that upscale the original game’s visuals for high-resolution displays. So why does a native PC port matter if emulation already works?
Several reasons, and they compound each other:
- Performance and compatibility — A native PC build runs directly on the host hardware without the overhead of emulating a PS2’s CPU and graphics pipeline. This means better performance on lower-end hardware, fewer compatibility issues across different PC configurations, and a more stable experience overall.
- Mod support — Native code is vastly more moddable than emulated code. Once Project Cane has a working PC build, the existing SlyMods community can access the game’s internals in ways that are much harder through emulation layers.
- Future preservation — A native PC port isn’t dependent on an emulator project continuing to be maintained. If PCSX2 development stopped tomorrow, the native port would still work on future hardware.
- The foundation for more — A working decompilation of the first game creates a documented codebase that could inform similar efforts for Sly 2 and Sly 3, eventually building toward a complete native PC library of the trilogy.
The Sly Cooper Franchise — Why This Matters to Fans
The gap between when Sly Cooper was last relevant and now is significant enough that it’s worth contextualising for anyone who didn’t grow up with the PS2. The franchise launched with Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus in September 2002, developed by Sucker Punch Productions. The game followed Sly Cooper — a gentleman thief raccoon — alongside his gang: Bentley the Turtle (the brains) and Murray the Hippo (the muscle). Their mission in the original game was to recover the Thievius Raccoonus, a family book containing every thieving technique passed down through the Cooper lineage, stolen by the Fiendish Five when Sly was a child.
Two sequels followed in rapid succession: Sly 2: Band of Thieves in 2004 and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves in 2005, both on PS2. The trilogy is widely considered one of the tightest trilogies in PlayStation history, with each game expanding on the previous entry’s mechanics and storytelling. The series blended stealth, platforming, and heist planning in a way that felt genuinely fresh at the time and holds up surprisingly well. All three games received The Sly Collection on PS3 in 2010 with HD visuals, later ported to Vita.
A fourth game, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, was developed by Sanzaru Games (rather than Sucker Punch) and released in 2013. It performed reasonably well but didn’t reignite the franchise. Sucker Punch, by that point deep in development of the inFamous series and later Ghost of Tsushima, has since confirmed they are unlikely to return to Sly Cooper. The franchise has had nothing new since 2013 — thirteen years of dormancy, with fans holding onto the hope that a remake or revival would eventually materialise.
Sony re-released the original game digitally on PS4 and PS5 on June 11, 2024, which gave the franchise a minor moment back in the spotlight. But there’s still been no PC version, no remake, and no sequel announced. Project Cane fills the gap that official support hasn’t.
How This Fits Into the Broader Fan Preservation Scene
Project Cane is part of a wave of fan decompilation projects that have flourished over the last five years, as communities around classic games have developed the tools and techniques to reverse-engineer PS2 and N64 era executables. The legal standing of these projects is nuanced — they don’t distribute original game code or assets, but the underlying practice of decompilation has faced legal challenges from companies including Nintendo, who has pursued takedowns of several high-profile fan projects.
Sony’s track record on fan projects is more mixed than Nintendo’s — less aggressive in some cases, more aggressive in others. Project Cane operates in a legally grey area that’s common to all decompilation efforts: as long as the project doesn’t distribute copyrighted assets and requires players to supply their own copy of the original game, it sits on defensible ground. That could change if Sony chooses to pursue it, which is always a risk with projects of this nature.
The team is aware of this, and the GitHub repository’s structure — deliberately containing zero original game data — reflects the standard protective approach these projects take.
Where Project Cane Is Now and What Comes Next
The project is in early development with no confirmed completion date or public release timeline. The “A Stealthy Approach” demo is a proof of concept, not a finished product. A complete native PC port of the full game would require the entire engine to be decompiled and rebuilt — a task that has taken similar projects years to reach completion.
The existing decompilation work on the GitHub repository suggests meaningful progress has been made on understanding the game’s internal systems, and the SlyMods Wiki — a community documentation effort covering Sly Cooper’s code structures — has been building the knowledge base that Project Cane’s team is drawing from.
For fans who have wanted to play Sly Cooper on PC, the message is: it’s coming, but patience is required. For fans who want to help accelerate that timeline, the decompilation project on GitHub is open to new contributors and has documentation on how to get involved.
In other gaming nostalgia and fan community news this week, the Disney+ live-action Gargoyles reboot was officially cancelled — another beloved ’90s and early 2000s property that fans are left hoping will get some kind of revival someday. And for a very different kind of fan project energy, LEGO’s biggest Book Nook set yet leaked ahead of its October 1 reveal — 1,690 pieces, a two-story bookshop interior, and no IP license for the first time in the line’s history.
