The Guggenheim Museum

Lore & Background

The Guggenheim Museum, with its sweeping helical ramp and central rotunda, has long been a target of the Raccoon Crew's imagination. In Sly Cooper and the Thieves in Time, the crew finally gets their shot at the New York landmark, threading through its stacked galleries to lift a high-value painting from under the noses of museum security.

The building's architecture becomes both the level's greatest asset and its most disorienting challenge. The continuous spiral means that what appears to be a single corridor is actually a multi-story loop, with gallery floors stacked above and below one another. Sly and his team must keep track of which level they are on, backtrack through the ramp, and use the open rotunda as a vertical shortcut.

The heist fits squarely into the Raccoon Crew's tradition of stealing from places that seem impossible to crack. The Guggenheim's open, glass-walled design means there are few hiding spots, forcing the crew to rely on timing, misdirection, and quick lateral movement rather than stealth in the narrow-corridor sense that defined earlier entries in the series.

In Their Own Story

The elevator doors part onto a floor of polished marble, and the spiral rises above like a frozen wave. Bentley mutters about the structural load rating of the rotunda while Murray checks his grappling hook for the third time. Sly crouches on the edge of the second gallery, watching a security guard's flashlight sweep the far wall in slow, lazy arcs. Somewhere above, the painting waits in its climate-controlled alcove, framed in gold, utterly still. "Alright," Sly whispers, tapping his earpiece. "Bentley, the vent shaft. Murray, the loading dock. I'll take the long way around the ramp. Nobody touches the glass. Nobody trips the laser grid. And for the love of all that is holy, nobody sneezes." A beat of silence. Then, in unison: *thud, thud, thud*—three pairs of paws hitting the marble in perfect rhythm as the crew fans out into the spiral.

Reader's Guide

The Guggenheim level opens with the Raccoon Crew entering through a service entrance on the building's ground floor. The first stretch runs along the base of the great spiral ramp, past rows of large canvases and glass display cases. The aesthetic is clean and modern: white walls, warm wood flooring, and the ever-present curve of the helical gallery wrapping around the central void.

As the crew ascends, the level opens into the rotunda, a vast circular space where the ceiling soars overhead and the spiral becomes visible as a continuous ribbon of gallery floor. This is where vertical platforming takes over—Sly can leap between the stacked levels, use Bentley's grappling line to cross the open center, and ride the ramp's gentle incline as a running surface. Security patrols move along the spiral in predictable loops, and the open sightlines mean the player must time dashes and crouches carefully.

The heist objective is to reach the target painting on an upper gallery floor, disable its alarm, and extract through a service corridor. Along the way, collectible gems are tucked into alcoves, behind display pedestals, and on narrow ledges overlooking the rotunda. A few are placed in the building's upper atrium, requiring a multi-step platforming sequence across the spiral's outer edge.

The overall tone is bright and architectural—less shadowy than a vault heist, more of a cat-and-mouse chase through a sunlit museum where every turn of the ramp reveals a new angle on the central void below.

Did You Know?

• The Guggenheim's real-world spiral architecture, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is preserved in the game's level design, with the helical ramp serving as the primary traversal path.
• The level's open, glass-walled gallery spaces contrast with the tighter, corridor-based stealth of earlier Sly Cooper entries, emphasizing timing and lateral movement over pure concealment.
• Sly Cooper and the Thieves in Time was developed by Sucker Punch Productions, the same studio behind the original Sly Cooper trilogy.
• The central rotunda in the level mirrors the actual museum's famous open atrium, where visitors can look down through multiple stacked gallery floors at once.