Crash. Bandicoot
Matt Dreher
Crash Bandicoot is a video game franchise originally developed by Naughty Dog as an exclusive for Sony's PlayStation console. It has seen numerous installments created by various developers and published on multiple platforms. The series consists predominantly of platform games, but also includes spin-offs in the kart racing and party game genres. The series was originally produced by Universal Interactive, which later became known as Vivendi Games; in 2008, Vivendi merged with Activision, which currently owns and publishes the franchise.
The games are mostly set on the fictitious Wumpa Islands, an archipelago situated to the south of Australia where humans and mutant animals co-exist, although other locations are common. The protagonist of the series is a genetically enhanced bandicoot named Crash, whose quiet life on the Wumpa Islands is often interrupted by his creator and the games' main antagonist, Doctor Neo Cortex, who attempts to eliminate Crash as a constant hindrance to his plots for world domination.
After presenting Way of the Warrior to Mark Cerny of Universal Interactive Studios, Naughty Dog was signed on to the company for three additional games.[3] In August 1994, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin began their move from Boston, Massachusetts to Los Angeles, California.[4] During the trip, Gavin and Rubin decided to create a 3D action-platform game, taking inspiration from 16-bit-era game series such as Donkey Kong Country, Mario and Sonic.[5] Because the player would be forced to constantly look at the character's backside, the game was jokingly code-named "Sonic's Ass Game".[3] The basic technology for the game and the Crash Bandicoot series as a whole was created somewhere near Gary, Indiana. The rough game theory was designed near Colorado. Soon afterward, Gavin and Rubin discarded their previous game design for Al O. Saurus and Dinestein, a side-scrolling video game based on time travel and scientists genetically merged with dinosaurs.[4] After moving into the Universal Interactive backlot, Gavin and Rubin met with Mark Cerny, discussed the design of the game and made an agreement to go into production.[3] In September 1994, Gavin and Rubin decided to develop their new game for the PlayStation, after which Rubin began character design.[4] In November 1994, Naughty Dog hired Dave Baggett, their first employee and a friend of Gavin's from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3][4] Together, Gavin and Baggett created the development tool "Game Oriented Object LISP" (GOOL), which would be used to create the characters and gameplay of the game.[3] In January 1995, Rubin became concerned about the programmer-to-artist ratio and hired Bob Rafei and Taylor Kurosaki as additional artists.[3][4]
Needing a lead character for the game, Naughty Dog recruited artists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson and met with them weekly to create the characters and environments of the game,[3][4] eventually creating a character named "Willy the Wombat".[6] The marketing director of Universal Interactive insisted that the character be named "Wez", "Wuzzles" or "Wizzy the Wombat".[7] On creating the levels for the game, Zembillas and Pearson first sketched each environment, designing and creating additional individual elements later. They aimed for an organic, overgrown look to the game and worked to completely avoid straight lines and 90-degree corners. A Naughty Dog artist sketched every single background object in the game before it was modeled. The artists were tasked with making the best use of textures and reducing the amount of geometry. Dark and light elements were juxtaposed to create visual interest and separate geometry. The Naughty Dog artists would squint when sketching, texturing and playing the levels to make sure they could be played by light value alone. Correct use of color was an important goal for Naughty Dog's artists; for example, mutually accentuating colors were chosen as the theme for the "Lost City" and "Sunset Vista" levels. The interior of Doctor Neo Cortex's castle was designed to reflect Cortex's twisted mind.[8]
After the main character's creation, the team went into three months of developing the game. The game first became functional in April 1995 and became playable in June 1995. The first 3 levels in the game were completed by August 1995. However, they were judged to be too difficult to appear so early in the game and were moved to the game's power plant area. Artist Charlotte Francis joined Naughty Dog at around this time.[4] In September 1995, a videotape of Crash Bandicoot was shown to Sony Computer Entertainment behind closed doors.[3][4] While playing the game during development, Rubin realized that there were many empty areas in the game due to the PlayStation's inability to process numerous on-screen enemy characters at the same time. Additionally, players were solving the game's puzzles too fast. Rubin soon came up with the idea of a box and putting various symbols on the sides to create puzzles. Breaking these boxes would serve to fill in the boring parts of the levels and give the player additional puzzles.[7] The first "crate" was placed in the game in January 1996, and would become the primary gameplay element of the series.[4] Willy the Wombat's destruction of the crates would eventually lead him to be renamed "Crash Bandicoot".[4][7] In March 1996, Sony agreed to publish Crash Bandicoot, which went into the alpha stage in April 1996. Crash Bandicoot was first shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 1996.
Development of Cortex Strikes Back began in October 1996. For the game, Andy Gavin created a new engine and scripting language named "Game Oriented Object LISP 2" (GOOL 2) that was three times faster than the previous game's engine, could handle ten times the animation frames and twice the polygon count.[3][4] The jungle levels were originally to have featured ground fog, but this was abandoned when magazines and the public began to heavily criticize other developers for using fog to hide polygon count. Sunlight and depth accentuation was experimented with for these levels. Wanting to have some "dirty" locations in the game, Naughty Dog worked in the sewer levels and added color contrast to the levels to show depth and break up the repetitive monotony of the endless sewer pipes.[8] A flat plane z-buffer was created for the game; because the water surfaces and mud in the jungle had to be a flat plane and be exactly flat on the Y-axis, there could be no waves and the subdividing plane could not be at an odd angle. The effect only worked on objects in the foreground and was only used on Crash, some enemies and a few boxes at the same time.[3] The soundtrack of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back was provided by Mutato Muzika (consisting of Mark Mothersbaugh and Josh Mancell), while the sound effects were created by Universal Sound Studios (consisting of Mike Gollom, Ron Horwitz and Kevin Spears). The characters were designed by Charles Zembillas of American Exitus, Incorporated. Clancy Brown provided the voice of Doctor Neo Cortex, while Brendan O'Brien voiced the dual role of Doctor N. Gin and Doctor Nitrus Brio and Vicki Winters voiced Coco Bandicoot.[9] The game was unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, Georgia in June 1997 to a positive response from the game industry. The game went into the alpha stage in August 1997. Around that time, Dan Arey, the lead designer of Gex: Enter the Gecko, joined Naughty Dog and streamlined the level design.[4]
Like the first, the second game was a commercial success, green-lighting a third game. Production of Crash Bandicoot: Warped began in January 1998, with Naughty Dog given only 10 months to complete the game.[3][4] Programmers Andy Gavin, Stephen White and Greg Omi created three new gameplay engines for the game. Two of the three new engines were three-dimensional in nature and were created for the airplane and jet-ski levels; the third new engine was created for the motorcycle levels in the style of a driving simulator. The new engines combined make up a third of the game, while the other two-thirds of the game consist of the tweaked engine used in the previous games. Jason Rubin explained that the "classic" engine and game style was preserved due to the success of the previous two games and went on to say that "were we to abandon that style of gameplay, that would mean that we would be abandoning a significant proportion of gamers out there". An arbitrary plane z-buffer was created for the jet-ski and flooded Egyptian hallway levels of the game.[3] To create a completely fluid feel for the water on these levels, an environment map that reflects the sky was fitted onto the surface of the water. A real shadow was given to the Crash character at the request of the Sony Computer Entertainment America producers, who were "sick of that little discus that's following him around." To create an "arcade" experience in the airplane levels and to differentiate them from flight simulators, the enemy planes were programmed to come out in front of the player and give the player ample time to shoot them before they turn around and shoot the player rather than come up behind the player and hit them from behind. The Relic system was introduced to give players a reason to return to the game after it has been completed.[10]
Also in 1998, Tiger Electronics released a series called 99X, each containing a black and white video game as opposed to the LCD games they were commonly known for. These were handhelds fitted with a dot-matrix screen, allowing for a wide variety of backgrounds and gameplay for a single game. Although running a software program stored in ROM, the systems were dedicated consoles, similar to the plug-and-play TV games of the 2000s decade.[11] A Crash Bandicoot game, simply titled Crash Bandicoot, was released as part of this series. Despite its name and being a platformer like its predecessors, it is not an adaptation of nor bears any relation to the 1996 game, instead featuring a plot of its own involving Crash retrieving treasure from a mansion haunted by a ghost named Mr. Crumb and his cronies.[12] This was the first handheld game to be released in the series, as well as the first to include a multiplayer mode.
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