As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.
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In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, but the time had come to expand. In…
So what was it that Sega and Nintendo had in 1994, but Sony didn’t?
An existing competing mascot character. Sega had Sonic and Nintendo had Mario, but Sony product slate was blank.
So we set about creating a mascot on the theory that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to slide into that opening. I’m still surprised it worked.
While all this art design was going on, I, and then in January 1995, Dave, struggled to build an engine and tool pipeline that would make it possible to render these grandiose cartoon worlds we had envisioned on paper. Since during fall of 1994 Jason was also the only artist, he frantically generated all the source material and banged on my head to make sure it would look incredible.
We were forging new gameplay ground, causing a lot of growing pains. The control of the main character is the single most important thing in a CAG. I did all the programming, but Mark helped whip me along. For example saying, “he doesn’t stop fast enough,” or “he needs to be able to jump for a frame or two AFTER he’s run off a cliff or it will be frustrating.” Criticism is essential, and as a programmer who wrote dozens of world class control schemes in the years between 1994 and 2004, I rewrote every one at least five or six times. Iteration is king.
But once the core gameplay worked, these cool levels were missing something. We’d spent so many polygons on our detailed backgrounds and “realistic” cartoon characters that the enemies weren’t that dense, so everything felt a bit empty.
Not only did we need to finish our E3 demo, but we needed a real name for the game — Willie the Wombat wasn’t going to cut it. Now, in the Naughty Dog office proper we knew he was a Bandicoot. In fact, we liked the idea of using an action name for him, like Crash, Dash, Smash, and Bash — fallout from the visceral reaction to smashing so many boxes.
Dave Baggett, Naughty Dog employee #1 (after Jason and I) throws his own thoughts on Crash Bandicoot into the ring.
After Naughty Dog Jason and I joined forces with another game industry veteran, Jason Kay (collectively Jason R & K are known as “the Jasons”). He was at Activision at the time of the Crash launch and offers his outside perspective.
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash 3. GOOL was my second custom language. GOOL was mostly interpreted, although by Crash 2 basic expressions were compiled into machine code.
Below is another journal article I wrote on making Crash in 1999. This was co-written with Naughty Dog uber-programmer Stephen White, who was my co-lead on Crash 2, Crash 3, Jak & Daxter, and Jak 2. It’s long, so I’m breaking it into three parts.
Part 2 of a detailed journal article I wrote on making Crash in 1999.
Part 3 of a journal article I wrote on making Crash in 1999.
In honor of Crash’s 15th Anniversary I wanted to make a post whose primary purpose is to serve as a repository for comments from you — the fans — about your first and favorite Crash Bandicoot impressions. Please make them…
In honor of the recent 15th Anniversary of my baby Crash Bandicoot, I present collected together the original suite of American TV Ads which premiered in September of 1996. It’s the suit that helped make the Bandicoot what he was. Thanks to…
At Naughty Dog, we pioneered the idea of simultaneous international release. It took a little while to perfect, but by Crash 2 and Crash 3 the same exact code ran all the worldwide versions. Both the games themselves and the marketing was highly localized and targeted. This attention after finishing the game to really polishing it up for the world really paid off in international sales.
It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic…
Ars Technica — the awesome technical website — put together an equally awesome video interview with me about the making of Crash Bandicoot as part of their War Stories series…
