ONE OF THE FIRST POLYGON PLATFORMERS AND A DEFINING PLAYSTATION TITLE, CRASH BANDICOOT MARKED THE BEGINNING OF A FRANCHISE THAT CONTINUES TO THIS DAY. CREATIVES DAN AREY AND JON BURTON EXPLAIN HOW THE POPULAR SERIES EVOLVED
By the autumn of 1994, most popular gaming genres had begun to transition from sprites to polygons, with the likes of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter and Descent respectively showing how racing games, beat-’em-ups and shooters could work in 3D. Polygon platform games hadn’t yet been tackled, however, and so when Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin relocated their company from Boston to California they spent the trip coming up with concepts for a 3D platformer that would ultimately become Crash Bandicoot.
At almost exactly the same time, Nintendo began producing Super Mario 64. The two games were subsequently released in 1996 – Crash just months after Mario. But where Mario moved through a relatively open world, Crash took a more fixed-route approach.
Future Naughty Dog developer Dan Arey was working at Crystal Dynamics at the time, but he took close notice of both titles. “When Mario 64 came out it shifted everybody’s thinking. We all realised that 3D platforming was amazing, but also that you had to do it in a controlled way,” Dan explains. “If you think about it, Crash Bandicoot was going down 3D roads with occasional 2D side-ways elements. But everything was very focussed in terms of mechanics, and that was really the brainchild of Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin. We saw some early demos when I was at Crystal Dynamics, and we were asking ourselves how they were getting so many polygons on the PlayStation. What they had done was precalculate the polygons you couldn’t see from a fixed-camera viewpoint, so it looked like there were many more polygons being pushed on the system than ever before.”
A less-technical point of interest was Naughty Dog’s hero, an obscure marsupial called a bandicoot, which as Dan points out was a choice based on a need for novelty. “You know it’s interesting, Bob Rafei was the art director and of course Jason Rubin is an artist as well, but they had another artist who did some concepts for them, and then they ran with those,” Dan recalls. “They made Crash a bandicoot because it was a unique concept
