In 1996 every console seemed to need a cartoon animal, and Sony’s PlayStation did not have one. Sega had Sonic and Nintendo had Mario. “But Sony?” Andy Gavin of Naughty Dog said later. “We hoped to jump into that slot.” He and Jason Rubin had driven to Los Angeles to work for Universal Interactive Studios with an idea whose rude working title nodded to Sega’s hedgehog: a character-driven action game in 3D, with the hero seen from behind as he ran away from the camera. It became Crash Bandicoot, a platform game that ran in narrow paths into the screen as well as across it. Sony spent the months before release insisting that Crash was not its mascot. He became, as Retro Gamer later put it, “an icon in his own right” anyway.
Fast facts
- Developer: Naughty Dog, for Universal Interactive Studios, with Mark Cerny as executive producer.
- Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment.
- Released: September 1996 in North America, November 1996 in Europe and December 1996 in Japan, for the PlayStation.
- Hero: a bandicoot, an Australian marsupial, given superpowers by the villain Dr Neo Cortex.
A bandicoot from the Universal lot
Naughty Dog had made the 3DO fighting game Way of the Warrior, and in 1994 Universal signed the studio to make games on its Los Angeles lot under Cerny. The PlayStation was an easy choice, Gavin told Retro Gamer: “The hardware was better. Sony seemed organised and perhaps most importantly, didn’t have a pre-existing ‘mascot’ character.” Gavin and Rubin toyed with a hero called Willie the Wombat before settling on a bandicoot, and Cerny hired the cartoonist Charles Zembillas to design the cast in a style that owed a lot to old Warner Bros cartoons. Gavin, one of the game’s two programmers, said the idea “seemed to offer a solution to the ‘how to do platforming in 3D’ dilemma. In practice, there were a lot of details to work out.”
The story was a cartoon’s. A Brazilian magazine, SuperGamePower, explained it for its readers in November 1996: Cortex, a scientist the scientific community had always laughed at, altered the genes of a bandicoot to make a super-powered soldier, but Crash turned out not to be the hero Cortex had hoped for and was thrown off the island, leaving his girlfriend Tawna behind.
How it plays
Game Informer noticed that Crash had only two moves, jumping and spinning. The spin, Edge thought, was “Taz-like”: it knocks enemies away and smashes crates. Most levels run along a fixed path, sometimes away from the camera, sometimes towards it, sometimes side-on in the old 2D manner. “There is a modicum of three-dimensional freedom within each level,” Edge wrote, but “this is strictly a linear trip”. A few set pieces break up the running: a ride on the back of a wild hog, and an Indiana Jones-style boulder rolling behind Crash.
The crates are the game’s collecting system. Wumpa fruit, 100 of which give an extra life, spills out of them, and so do extra lives and Aku Aku masks, each of which absorbs one hit; collect three and Crash is invincible for a while. An exclamation-mark crate fills in the outline crates nearby. Finishing a level without dying and with every crate broken earns a gem. Most are clear gems, which come into play only at the very end; each coloured gem opens a new route in another level, such as a bridge across a pit of slime. A perfect score is rewarded with a special ending.
It was hard, and it was stingy with saves. The game could be saved, or a password collected, only in a bonus round, and the bonus round could be reached only by finding three tokens hidden in a level. Edge found that missing one could send a player back “four or five levels” after a game over: “Making the going this tough is a refreshing change but can, inevitably, lead to frustration.” Gavin agreed, years later, that the game was “a little hard in Crash 1”.
Edge counted 32 levels across three islands, with five bosses to beat before Cortex himself.
Not a mascot
Sony was careful about Crash. “Sony has gone to enormous lengths to stress that Crash Bandicoot is not a mascot for the PlayStation,” Edge reported in June 1996. “He is an independent game character with no branding link to Sony’s hardware platform.” By its review in December Edge noted that Sony was still “officially denying” it, “probably until they see if it sells or not”.
The American press had no such doubts. Game Informer’s review declared that the PlayStation had at last been “baptized into the world of mascots”, and described Crash as “the guy Sony is betting on to sell units”.
Reviews
Edge gave it seven out of ten. It thought the graphics extraordinary: “the most intricate texture maps yet seen in a PlayStation game”, Aztec stonework “delicately lit by flickering torches”, a thunderstorm and a fog-bound rope bridge, and a soundtrack it credited to Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, “a bizarre mixture of native drumming, whoops and weird electronics”. Underneath, it found “a very basic platform game”, with enemies and crates “in exactly the same place every time” and no multiple routes or exits: “definitely no Mario or Yoshi’s Island”. Even so, it expected the looks alone to make the game a big success, as they had for Donkey Kong Country.
It arrived in a crowded autumn, in what Edge called a three-way war with Sega’s NiGHTS and Nintendo’s Super Mario 64, both of which it thought more inventive. Retro Gamer later put the difference in Crash’s favour as attitude: where Mario 64 became the milestone, Crash “offered an edgier counterpoint”.
A series
The game sold. By June 1998 Edge reported that the Crash Bandicoot series had passed five million copies worldwide, and it did unusually well in Japan for a Western game. Arcade magazine wrote in 1999 that in Japan “Crash Bandicoot is the most successful Western-designed game character”.
Naughty Dog’s deal with Universal covered two sequels, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997) and Crash Bandicoot: Warped (1998). “Crash 2 shares the same architecture, but everything was overhauled and improved,” Gavin said, while Warped was “just a death sprint. We did the whole game in nine months.” The kart game Crash Team Racing (1999) was the studio’s last Crash, after which it moved on to Jak and Daxter and the character passed to other developers. In 2017 Vicarious Visions remade the first three games for the PlayStation 4 as the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, working from the original games’ level geometry to match Crash’s jump height and running speed; Wireframe reported that it sold more than 2.5 million copies in its first three months.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, pp. 68–69, Naughty Dog feature: Crash as “an icon in his own right”; Universal in 1994; the working title; Gavin’s quotations; Willie the Wombat; Charles Zembillas and the Warner Bros influence; “Dave and I (the Crash 1 programmers)”; sales in Japan; the three-game deal; Crash 2, Warped and Crash Team Racing.
- Edge issue 33, June 1996, p. 32: preview (publisher Sony, developer Universal Interactive Studios); “not a mascot”.
- Game Informer issue 41, September 1996, pp. 10–11 and 21: review; two moves; 26 hidden gems, clear and coloured, and how to earn them; saves only in bonus rounds; crate types; “baptized into the world of mascots”; Sony’s pre-order advertisement.
- SuperGamePower (Brazil) issue 32, November 1996, p. 56: the story, Tawna, Wumpa fruit (“Juntando 100 você ganha uma vida extra”) and Aku Aku masks.
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, pp. 45–47: review, seven out of ten (32 levels, three islands, Cortex, the gems, the save system, Mothersbaugh, “officially denying”).
- Edge issue 59, June 1998, p. 60: the Crash Bandicoot series’ “worldwide sales of over five million copies”.
- Arcade issue 2, January 1999, p. 112: Crash in Japan.
- Wireframe issue 5, January 2019, pp. 46–47: the N. Sane Trilogy, Vicarious Visions, sales of 2.5 million by September 2017, the original geometry.
- “Crash Bandicoot (video game)”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates by region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot_(video_game)
- For Mark Cerny’s part, see the Mark Cerny entry and its sources.