It's new to me: Crash Bandicoot

Sony's first mascot came from Naughty Dog's first game in their partnership, and it all feels even further in the past than that phrasing suggests now.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Crash Bandicoot has had quite the life. Originally created by Naughty Dog at the start of their expansion beyond just a handful of employees, and then negotiated into becoming Playstation’s mascot in the battle against Mario and Sonic, things changed in a hurry. The first game released in 1996, then two sequels and a kart racer were developed and released over the next three years: Naughty Dog would move on from Crash Bandicoot after that, with Eurocom developing the Playstation-exclusive party game, Crash Bash, in 2000, ending the five-game deal that Universal Interactive — Naughty Dog’s partner and the home of their studio in its early years — had with Sony Computer Entertainment. Crash went multiplatform, another 13 games released over the next decade, and then the series went dormant until 2017’s remake trilogy, which also ushered in some new sequels and a mobile game.

Crash is now not only multiplatform, but an Xbox mascot: Activision got their mitts on the character in 2008, after merging with Vivendi (what Universal Interactive eventually renamed itself), and then Microsoft initially purchased the even larger entity of Activision Blizzard in 2022. Microsoft’s Xbox division didn’t even exist when Crash Bandicoot made his debut for Sony’s Playstation, which makes it all feel a little weird, but that’s capitalism, baby, just buy yourself a history. At least it seems like Crash Bandicoot will remain multiplatform despite Xbox’s ownership of the franchise — there’s money in the systems that people are actually buying, and all.

At the beginning, though, Crash was a Sony mascot. At least, once Naughty Dog and Universal convinced Sony of their need for one. Sony’s entry into the console space was a success from the start, as Sega realized in a hurry when their 32-bit Saturn fell behind out of the gate, but with Nintendo preparing to launch their own new console in 1996, Sony shoring up their defenses still made plenty of sense. So, Crash could serve as a mascot, at least through most of the remaining life of the Playstation, and then everyone involved could figure out what was next when it was needed. As Sony’s Ami Blaire, the marketing manager for Crash Bandicoot, told Polygon in 2017, this wasn’t exactly intentional on Sony’s part:

[Sony] absolutely did not set out for Crash to be the mascot and/or to be the persona for PlayStation. It was nice because everything we had done when we launched PlayStation — from the Polygon Man and to "You are not ready," to all of that — was always a little bit edgier, and so the [direction] of the campaign that the team came up with for Crash Bandicoot certainly fit within the culture that we had created, but it wasn't intended to do that.

It was what Naughty Dog was going for, however, as even their co-founder Andy Gavin explained in the same oral history of the game, and it certainly felt like this was the case. It was on an unofficial basis, however, but “official” vs. “unofficial” is not going to be a distinction that matters for your average gamer who just likes smashing boxes and owning a Playstation. They see the marketing, they see the commercials, they see Sony publishing the game, and they see a console without its own clear mascot otherwise a la Mario and Sonic. It’s not a reach to assume here.

Image credit: MobyGames

Crash Bandicoot would end up selling 6.8 million copies amid its first-party marketing push, which is what allowed Naughty Dog to so quickly build a reputation for quality with the sequels before they moved on to something else (the something else being the Playstation 2, Sony-published mascot-series, Jak & Daxter). It did its job, of course, but from a quality perspective, it certainly didn’t match, say, Super Mario 64, or… well, fine, Sega didn’t release a Sonic game on the Saturn, so points to Sony and Naughty Dog there, at least. The reviews for the original Crash, though, were not always positive — there were certainly portions of the game receiving praise, but these more negative reviews (correctly) pointed out that the game had some issues with the controls, with knowing exactly where you were in space during jumps, with not being particularly innovative, and so on. Crash Bandicoot wasn’t a bad game by any means — even with the more negative reviews, it still managed an 80/100 on GameRankings — and there was plenty of promise within it as well as realized potential on both the graphical and audio side. But coming at it nearly 30 years after the fact, I get some of the frustration expressed with it decades ago… and also understand that the sequels are supposed to be clearly superior outings that did deliver on the promise of the original.

The best description of Crash Bandicoot that I’ve got is that it would have been a perfect game to receive as a gift when you didn’t have another new game coming in until the next gift. With no other games to distract you, Crash Bandicoot can be highly rewarding, but only if you’re willing to devote replay after replay of every level in order to receive a clear gem for a perfect completion. That is, clearing a stage without dying, without ever having to utilize the checkpoints that exist, while also destroying every box in the stage. If the rough edges weren’t there, if there were just a little more to do in each level and a little more variety, this would be a task worth doing for basically anyone who picked it up to play it. But if you have any reason to play something else, well. You’d probably choose to do that.

Just so we’re clear here, I enjoyed Crash Bandicoot, even taking the time to play the Playstation original and its 2017 remake edition, while also checking out the modified Japanese release of the 1996 version, to boot. And I’m looking forward to seeing its sequel in action with a controller in hand instead of just watching my wife attempt to break every box and unearth every secret, as well. The rough edges of the original Crash Bandicoot do not feel less rough in 2024, though, not even in the recent remake, so, moving on from there to something else was an easy choice, rather than feeling like an attempt at 100 percent was worth the time or effort.

Here’s how Crash works. It’s a 3D platformer that utilizes multiple viewpoints: sometimes Crash is running into the background, sometimes into the foreground (such as when being chased by a giant, rolling boulder), and sometimes in a more traditional side-scrolling setup. And, in some of the more complicated stages, you might be a little more top down in order to move in all three of those directions as the level design dictates. That’s all to the good, and when you get a handle on just how Crash moves and that, polygons or not, you’re still basically doing pixel-perfect jumping most of the time, it can all work splendidly. There will be many deaths before that moment, though. And plenty after, too, but more before.

Luckily, Crash isn’t stingy with the extra lives: you get a new one for every 100 collected fruits, which you find just out and about and also within boxes, and there are also extra lives aplenty, though, only the first time you see them in a level. Die and come back to that spot, and the extra life box will have been replaced with a box with five fruits in it. There’s a password system, as well, though this was replaced by more standard saves in the Japanese version of the game.

There’s combat in Crash Bandicoot, but really, not that much. You can jump on top of some enemies to kill them or flip them over so they’re harmless, and spin attack others. Then there are some you can’t hurt at all and you’ve just got to avoid. Which of these any enemy is, well, you just have to guess by doing. And if you don’t have the protection of an Aku Aku mask — a floating, talking mask that trails behind you and often serves to obscure your view of what’s in front of you in levels where you most need to be able to see if that’s a hole in the ground in that dark corridor that you’ll fall into and die should you fail to recognize it as such, but hey at least it also absorbs a hit — you’ll die in one hit, regardless of the attack. Bump into a turtle? Dead. Touch fire? Instantly and completely incinerated. Electrocuted mid-jump? Even if you have an Aku Aku mask, you’re dead there if the floor underneath is opening and closing or a platform below is moving, because the delay being shocked causes will be enough to cause you to miss the landing. Collect three Aku Aku masks without losing one, by the way, and you end up with a super star-caliber invincibility that’ll automatically launch foes as if you spun into them, and you also move a little faster, too.

The reason there are very few enemies in Crash Bandicoot is because Naughty Dog put almost all of the available processing power into impressive backgrounds and Crash himself. From that 2017 oral history:

Jason Rubin (Co-founder, Naughty Dog): We kept going and going and going, and then eventually I built the model and we had 532 polygons for Crash. I remember I was told to get it in under 600. I got it down to 532. Which, you know, an eyeball in a modern game is probably more than 500 polygons, so it was just insane that we could get that working, and we were off.

…

We had a very limited number of polygons, as I said, 3,000. When you draw Crash with 532 of them and you start to draw trees and rocks and everything in the background, your creatures [and] your enemies are not going to have a lot of polygons. Which is why they're turtles, which have very small legs and not much going on, and they're not more complicated creatures. We tended to have really, really simple enemies, because that was where we saved our polygon count. Also, you couldn't have a lot of them on screen. You had two turtles on screen? Fine. You had three turtles on screen? Problem.

The distance between turtles had to be great enough — this is the first level, if you go back and play the first level — you just couldn't have a lot of turtles next to each other. And that meant there was a lot of running between turtles. What are you going to do when you're running between turtles?

Rubin goes on to say that the game was actually pretty “boring” at the point where they figured this out with the enemies. There wasn’t anything to do in between those turtles besides jump from one platform to the next, and not every stage was full of intense platforming challenges to the degree where that would be acceptable. The boxes that so much of Crash’s gameplay revolves around? Those didn’t exist yet at this point in development, and they were introduced specifically because, as Rubin said, players needed something to do because the game was “boring” at this stage, and also, they didn’t have the polygons left to do anything more complicated than a box:

Andy Gavin (co-founder, Naughty Dog): …We knew we needed something in the levels to busy them up. They were too sparse. They were boring. And we're like, "We can't afford anything," [but] Jason really wanted something that was 3D. I'm like, "Well we need something that's 2D, because we just can't afford enough polygons. We've used all the polygons already with all your ... like, 300 polygon creatures that look so good, but they're using too many polygons. We don't have any extra polygons." And he's like, "Well, what's the simplest 3D thing we can do?"

And I'm like, "Well, a box!" [laughs].

…

It just didn't seem hard to program and the art was really easy. Jason went and did the box art for all of the boxes before I was done programming the first one. By the end of that Saturday, by the time we went out and found some other bad food at probably nine or 10 at night, he had drawn and I had programmed up regular boxes, TNT boxes — nitro boxes came in the next game — question mark boxes, bouncing boxes. Maybe the bouncing boxes happened the next day; I don't remember, but most of them. ... Within two days, they were all programmed — not that there weren't lots and lots of tweaks to that code — and we were like, "Ah, this is the most awesome bang for the buck [laughs]."

Crash had now truly taken shape, not by accident, but at least due to limitations. Remember when games had limitations that weren’t just budgetary? A lot of the things you remember from older games for good reason, the things that made them what they are, were devised because of technical limitations. Crash ended up playing the way it does because Naughty Dog wanted to push the fidelity of the character and ensure that he had fluid, cartoonish movements, and that meant there was little space left to go around in terms of actual gameplay. So, boxes. A solution arrived at quickly because Naughty Dog didn’t have the time or polygons left to broaden their brainstorming anymore than they did, but because of that, it’s also a laser-focused one.

There are dozens of boxes in every stage. Some have one fruit in them, some have 10 but you need to bounce on or under them again and again to extract all of them, rather than breaking it outright. Some are full of explosives, which will count down if you bounce on it but explode outright if you spin into it. Boxes are used as a bonus, as a secret, as something to do, as temporary platforms and jump challenges. They’re so intertwined with the central gameplay that it’s amazing to even consider that there was a single moment of Crash Bandicoot’s development where they weren’t in play, especially, as Rubin pointed out in the oral history, “late in development” and “almost Alpha” before bringing the game to CES for people to see.

In the original Crash Bandicoot, in order to earn a clear gem, you needed to collect every box in a stage and finish it without dying — this was first changed in the Japanese version, however, you would have to go back to break all of the previously broken boxes, as they were not saved by hitting a checkpoint. Boxes are purposefully put in hard-to-reach or precarious places, or straight-up hidden from view, with you needing to maybe perform a tricky jump that won’t cost you the box you’re using as an elevated platform or trampoline in the process lest you blow your chance at perfection.

In 2017’s N. Sane Trilogy remake, only certain levels — the ones where you earn a colored gem instead of a standard clear gem — still require a perfect run without a death in it to earn a full clear. These colored gems, by the way, are used to add extra static and moving platforms to levels scattered throughout the Wumpa Islands the game takes place in, platforms that lead to not just alternate paths, but all of those boxes that the game berated you for not finding earlier when it wasn’t possible for you to do so. In order to fully clear Crash Bandicoot, you need to basically complete the game, then play through everything again with all of those special colored gems in tow. The 2017 game also adds in the time trials found in Naughty Dog’s third crash title, Warped, giving you even more reason to go back, but this inclusion didn’t exist back in 1996, nor for its Japanese release. (All of the various regional differences for Crash Bandicoot can be found at the game’s page at The Cutting Room Floor.)

On the art and audio side, there are some fascinating stories to tell. Josh Mancell is listed as the game’s composer, and he worked with Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and a bunch of other projects fame at a company called Mutato Muzika. The relationship between the two would last throughout Naughty Dog’s time with Crash Bandicoot, and knowing the kind of people involved with the music helps explain why it’s got such a playful, fun sound to it at pretty much all times. Crash Bandicoot was maybe positioned as a mascot for Sony to contend with Mario, but really, in terms of the whole island/jungle setting, the cartoony vibes, the animal baddies, and so on, Crash was really going up against Rare’s Donkey Kong Country series, which also sold loads and loads of games — not quite at Mario’s level, no, but neither was Crash Bandicoot. That soundtrack also knew when to be playful and fun, when to be bouncy and when to brood a little, so matching that same kind of energy and understanding of what made the worlds work like they did was important. Crash doesn’t have quite as many memorable tunes, but the ones that catch your ear don’t let it go, either.

As for the art, Naughty Dog actually contracted out to freelancers to design Crash Bandicoot’s whole design and style, and the end result of this wasn’t just Crash, but disagreements about proper credits, as Polygon’s oral history went into:

Charles Zembillas (independent artist): …We had a magazine ... I don't remember what it was, but [it had] the first article that came out about Crash Bandicoot. He was on the cover of this magazine. We started reading it. I think it was on the porch of his house or on the back steps of the studio, and we're reading this and we're just in shock. We were in shock, like, "What the hell is this?" You know? We came along to tweak the project? We came along to tweak the project? We created the whole thing from the ground up. It was astonishing. We were just astonished by it. I guess Joe [Pearson] confronted Jason about it, and I left a lengthy message with him on his voicemail just telling him how utterly uncool this was. And they blamed it on the press. They blamed it on the reporters. [They said,] "We can't control what reporters write."

Zembillas would go on to say that the entire concept of Crash came from the artists and Universal’s producer David Siller — who did not agree to join the oral history, and had begun sharing a lot of concept art he took credit for a couple of years before it — and that Naughty Dog’s role was more akin to a production company that took all the material given to them and turned it into the game that was released. Rubin disagrees about Siller’s importance to the project — “I can probably go through 100 names, some of which I've long forgotten, before I get to Dave.” — but is apologetic about what happened with the artists in terms of them not getting the kind of pay they were promised in a “this will lead to bigger things!” way or them feeling as if their contributions were diminished. The disagreement seems to be about percentage of credit: the artists believe they deserve more, as does Siller, while Rubin and Naughty Dog feel that this was more of a team effort than that portrayal suggests.

Frankly, it all sounds like a huge mess, where the only thing that’s known for sure is that Joe Pearson and Charles Zembillas should have been paid more than they were for the work that they did. But, as Pearson said, he probably shouldn’t have taken the deal that was offered, either:

“The money wasn't big; I'll be honest. I agreed to the terms. We probably should've been paid double that; it might have been more fair. But that's not Naughty Dog's fault. They made an offer and I took it, right? So I'm not trying to lay any blame on them for the money. But considering that the money was OK but not great, the process went really smoothly — which it did. Probably we did a lot more work than the money was worth, you know?”

There is… a lot more than what’s here within the oral history, and it’s worth reading to see a situation that hadn’t resolved itself over 20 years after the original release of Crash Bandicoot. Remember kids: never agree to a deal that even implies that you’re working for some kind of exposure. Naughty Dog was a new studio, sure, but they were aiming to hook up with Sony, and they were working out of literally Universal. The money to create their mascot would have been found, in that situation and future ones that have yet to go down. And also maybe document the work that is done so two decades later there isn’t a he said, he said about who actually did the originating and who was merely iterating off of it with non-actionable suggestions.

Anyway. Crash Bandicoot was a good time much more often than not, but it sure is frustrating as hell when it isn’t. This first experience with the original (and its remake) have not scared me off of going for the second, supposedly improved game in the series, which is a point in the original’s favor for sure. It didn’t quite reach the level of true Sony mascot that Naughty Dog intended, no, but nearly seven million copies sold and a couple of nearly as successful sequels isn’t nothing by any means, and it all later helped get Naughty Dog to the point of creating actual Sony mascots that even Sony Computer Entertainment would agree are that. Like with Crash, they got there eventually.

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