Crash Bandicoot (video game)
Crash Bandicoot is a 1996 platform game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The player controls Crash, a genetically enhanced bandicoot created by the mad scientist Doctor Neo Cortex. The story follows Crash as he aims to foil Cortex's plans for world domination and rescue his girlfriend Tawna, a female bandicoot also created by Cortex. The game is played from a third-person perspective in which the camera trails behind Crash, though some levels feature forward-scrolling and side-scrolling perspectives.
After accepting a publishing deal from Universal Interactive Studios, Naughty Dog co-founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin set out on a cross-country road trip from Boston to Los Angeles. During this time, they decided to create a character-based action-platform game from a three-dimensional perspective, having observed the graphical trend in arcade games. Upon meeting, Naughty Dog and Universal Interactive chose to develop the game for the PlayStation due to Sony's lack of a mascot character. The game's main character was tentatively named "Willy the Wombat", and cartoonists Joe Pearson and Charles Zembillas were hired to help create the game's characters and story. Crash Bandicoot was named for his habitual destruction of crates, which were inserted into the game to alleviate emptiness in the levels. Sony agreed to publish the game following a demonstration from Naughty Dog, and the game was unveiled at E3 1996.
Crash Bandicoot was released to generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the game's graphics, presentation, audio, difficulty level and title character, but criticized its linearity and lack of innovation as a platform game. The game went on to sell over 6 million units, making it one of the best-selling PlayStation games and the highest selling ranked on sales in the United States. For the game's Japanese release, the gameplay and aesthetics underwent extensive retooling to make the game more palatable for Japanese audiences, and as a result it achieved commercial success in Japan. Crash Bandicoot became the first installment in an eponymous series of games that would achieve critical and commercial success and establish Naughty Dog's reputation in the video game industry. A remastered version was released as a part of the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy in 2017.
Gameplay
Crash Bandicoot is a platform game in which the player controls the titular character Crash, who is tasked with traversing 32 levels to defeat Doctor Neo Cortex and rescue Tawna. Most of the game takes place from a third-person perspective in which Crash moves into the screen. Certain levels that require him to flee from a rolling boulder reverse this perspective, while other levels are played from a traditional side-scrolling perspective. Crash is capable of moving in all directions; aside from moving left and right, he can move away from or toward the player, and the controls do not change with his position. His two primary forms of offense consist of jumping onto enemies and performing a spinning attack that kicks enemies off the screen. Kicked enemies can strike other enemies that are currently on-screen. Two levels involve Crash mounting and steering a wild boar that accelerates uncontrollably, requiring him to maneuver around obstacles and bypass enemies.Scattered throughout each level are various types of crates that can be broken open by jumping on them, spinning into them, or knocking a kicked enemy into them. Most crates contain "Wumpa Fruit" that can grant Crash an extra life if 100 are collected. Some crates display an icon of what they contain. Crates displaying Aku Aku will grant Crash a floating Aku Aku mask that protects him from a single enemy or hazard. Collecting three masks consecutively grants Crash temporary invulnerability from all minor dangers. Crates marked with a "C" act as checkpoints where Crash can respawn after losing a life. Metallic crates marked with an exclamation point cause an element of the surrounding environment to change if they are struck. Jumping on red TNT crates triggers a three-second timer that culminates in an explosion, while spinning into them causes an immediate detonation.
In roughly half of the game's levels, certain crates contain tokens in the likeness of Tawna, Cortex, or his assistant Nitrus Brio. Collecting three tokens of a single character will transport Crash to a "bonus round" where he must break crates in a side-scrolling area. Falling off the screen during a bonus round will not cost the player a life, but will send Crash back to the point in the level he was transported from. A few levels contain bonus rounds for two different characters. Tawna's bonus rounds are designed to be the easiest and most plentiful, and clearing one enables the player to save their game. Brio's bonus rounds are more difficult, featuring more TNT crates and requiring more precise jumps. Cortex's bonus rounds are the most difficult and are only included in two levels. Clearing Cortex's bonus round grants Crash a key that unlocks a secret level.
Clearing a level without losing a life and after breaking all of its crates will grant Crash a gem, which will be displayed by the level's name on the map screen. If the player clears a level in one life without breaking all the crates, a screen displays the amount of crates that were missed, and if the player loses any lives over the course of the level, they will instead be sent directly to the map screen upon the level's completion. While most gems are clear and colorless, six colored gems enable Crash to access areas in previous levels that he was unable to reach before. Collecting all 26 gems unlocks a special epilogue sequence accessible from the game's penultimate level.
Plot
In a secluded archipelago west of Tasmania, the mad scientist Doctor Neo Cortex uses his "Evolvo-Ray" to genetically alter the local wildlife into an anthropomorphic army of soldiers for the purpose of world domination. Among these soldiers is an eastern barred bandicoot named Crash, whom Cortex selects to be the general of his army. The day before Crash is subjected to the "Cortex Vortex", a machine intended to brainwash him, he becomes attached to a female bandicoot named Tawna. Crash is rejected by the Cortex Vortex and is chased out of Cortex's castle, plummeting to the ocean below. As Cortex prepares Tawna to be used in Crash's place, Crash washes up on a smaller island and resolves to rescue Tawna and defeat Cortex. He is aided in his mission by Aku Aku, a witch doctor spirit who acts as the guardian of the islands.Crash undertakes a trek across the archipelago that spans several months. He traverses through a native village and defeats the hostile tribal chief Papu Papu. Cortex receives news of Crash's approach and dispatches his soldiers to dispose of Crash. After Crash defeats Ripper Roo, Koala Kong and Pinstripe Potoroo, he reaches Cortex's stronghold and faces Cortex's assistant Doctor Nitrus Brio, who battles Crash by ingesting a potion to transform himself into a giant green monster. Crash escapes to Cortex's airship, while Cortex boards a hovercraft and attacks Crash with a plasma gun as his castle burns behind them. Crash deflects Cortex's energy bolts against him and sends Cortex falling out of the sky. Tawna embraces Crash as the two ride Cortex's airship into the sunset.
In an alternate ending, Crash and Tawna escape Cortex's castle on a large bird, and an epilogue elaborates on the fates of the game's boss characters following Cortex's defeat and disappearance. Papu Papu sells the remains of Cortex's castle to a resort developer and uses the proceeds to open a plus-size clothing shop; Ripper Roo undergoes intense therapy and higher education, and authors a well-received book discussing rapid evolution and its consequences; Koala Kong moves to Hollywood and becomes a film actor; Pinstripe opens a sanitation company in Chicago and prepares for a gubernatorial campaign; and Brio rediscovers a love for bartending.
Development
Conception
On January 5, 1994, MCA Inc. executive vice president Skip Paul and senior vice president Robert Biniaz established Universal Interactive Studios – a division for developing and publishing video games and interactive software – in response to a film industry trend of studios opening similar divisions. With this development, Universal Interactive was eager to acquire independent developers with the intention of eventually using them to create games and interactive movies based on Universal Pictures's existing franchises. At that year's Winter Consumer Electronics Show, Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin displayed their latest game Way of the Warrior in search of a publisher; by chance, their booth was situated in close proximity to that of Universal Interactive, where Biniaz and Mark Cerny served as its representatives. A bidding war broke out between Universal Interactive, The 3DO Company, and Crystal Dynamics; Universal Interactive won the game's publishing rights by offering Naughty Dog a place on their lot and funding for three additional games, over which Naughty Dog would have creative freedom. This atypical agreement ensured that Naughty Dog could be locked in long enough to create a product that met Universal Interactive's expectations.In August 1994, Gavin and Rubin began their move from Boston, Massachusetts to Los Angeles, California. Before leaving, Gavin and Rubin hired Dave Baggett, their first employee and a friend of Gavin's from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Baggett would not start working full-time until January 1995. During the trip, Gavin and Rubin studied arcade games intensely and noticed that racing, fighting and shooting games had begun making a transition into full 3D rendering. They initially considered a 3D beat 'em up based on Final Fight before recognizing that their favorite video game genre, the character-based action-platform game, had no 3D games at this point. The pair were especially fond of Donkey Kong Country, and wondered how such a game could function in three dimensions. They figured that in a 3D perspective, the player would be constantly looking at the character's back rather than their profile, and thus jokingly called the hypothetical project "Sonic's Ass Game". Gavin and Rubin had a rough game theory designed by the time they reached Colorado, and they discarded a design for Al O. Saurus and Dinestein, a side-scrolling video game based on time travel and scientists genetically merged with dinosaurs.
Naughty Dog met with Cerny after moving into their new Universal City, California offices. The group unanimously liked the "Sonic's Ass Game" idea and discussed what video game system to develop it for. They decided that the 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, and Sega Saturn were unsatisfactory options due to poor sales and development units they deemed to be "clunky". The Nintendo 64 was merely rumored at the time, and Rubin observed in hindsight that although the console's polygon engine was intricate, its cartridge-based format would have been restrictive. The team ultimately chose to develop the game for Sony's PlayStation, considering the company and console "sexy" and taking into account the company's lack of an existing competing mascot character. After signing a developer agreement with Sony, Naughty Dog paid $35,000 for a PlayStation development unit and received the unit in September 1994. A development budget of $1.7 million was set for the game, and production began in October 1994. Rubin and Gavin were the 44th and 45th individual developers to sign onto development for the PlayStation, and according to Rubin's approximation, Crash Bandicoot was the 30th game to begin development for the PlayStation. David Siller was assigned as the game's producer by Universal Interactive due to his expertise in game design, despite Gavin and Rubin's reluctance toward having a producer.
For the game's lead character, Naughty Dog wanted to do what Sega and Warner Bros. did while designing their respective characters – Sonic the Hedgehog and the Tasmanian Devil – and incorporate an existing animal that was appealing and obscure. The team purchased a field guide on Tasmanian mammals and selected the wombat, potoroo, and bandicoot as options. Gavin and Rubin went with "Willy the Wombat" as a temporary name for the starring character of the game. They never intended the name to be final due both to the name sounding "too dorky" and to the existence of a non-video game property of the same name; the name was also used by Hudson Soft for its Japan-exclusive Sega Saturn role-playing game Willy Wombat. While the character was effectively a bandicoot, he was still referred to as "Willy the Wombat" as a final name had not been formulated yet. The villain of the game was created while Gavin and Rubin were eating near Universal Interactive Studios. Gavin came up with the idea of an "evil genius villain with a big head" who was "all about his attitude and his minions". Rubin, having become fond of the animated television series Pinky and the Brain, imagined a more malevolent version of the Brain with minions resembling the weasel characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After Gavin put on a voice depicting the attitude in mind for the character, he and Rubin instantly came up with the name "Doctor Neo Cortex".
Following their previous experience with Way of the Warrior, Gavin and Rubin recognized that a larger development team would be required to create their new game. As they settled into Universal Interactive's back lot, Gavin, Rubin and Baggett befriended Taylor Kurosaki, a visual effects artist who was working on the television series seaQuest DSV in the same building. Kurosaki, who had been using LightWave 3D in his work, was attracted by the opportunity to learn and use Alias PowerAnimator, and became Naughty Dog's next employee on January 5, 1995. Bob Rafei was also hired around this time, and was assigned as the game's art director.