Crash Bandicoot is one of the very few platformers that I can actually stand (got to 103% completion). It's just so very well designed to avoid annoying the player while retaining difficulty.
Crash Bandicoot has a highly entertaining development story as well. They straight up violated Sony's hardware rules, and Sony was so desperate, they let them.
I was curious about what rule they violated -- it comes up in part 5:
"The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live [ Andy NOTE: running, not on videotape ]. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!
Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!
Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”
Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash."
That entire Development Story is such a massive gem. Everyone interested in programming, game programming, and video game creation in general should fully dig into it:
Making Crash Bandicoot
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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.
That's one of the finest and most entertaining "post mortem's" (it didn't die, though so what's that called?) I've ever read.
There's something in it for everyone who enjoys programming, video games, or technical papers.
My favorite four takeaways from the development story are:
1) The mechanic I spoke of above where the game tries to dumb things down for less skilled players.
2) The fact that Crash Bandicoot was originally designed as the flagship game and mascot character and ultimately Sony messed up in terms of making Crash into the Sony Playstation mascot as Mario or Sonic were to the Nintendo and Sega consoles / companies respectively.
Naughty Dog aimed for that as they saw an opening for it and, I think, absolutely nailed that aspect of creating an iconic and lovable character but Sony seemed gun shy about it. I could see, with hindsight, how Naughty Dog could have developed Crash further as a character and branched out in terms of making all sorts of Crash branded games of various genres in the future instead of the few platformers that we got (although they were all well above average).
3) The fact that pit falls, unbreakable boxes, and other in-level obstacles / item boxes weren't just there by chance. The Sony Playstation could not handle too many enemies on screen so the level designers worked hard to craft levels that would ensure enemies would fall into pits or be blocked by boxes from entering into an area that would ultimately crash the game / console from having too many polygons on screen.
4) The fact that Naughty Dog was thought to have "special secret hardware codes" given to them by Sony because comparatively Crash Bandicoot was performing and looking a few levels above anything else other Sony Playstation developers were capable of creating. The team wrote all sorts of specialized tools and programs to help refactor polygons, smart load levels, and ensure that the team was able to have great looking graphics and models on screen that were as close as possible to squeezing out everything the hardware could handle (see item 3 above) and this caused other developer teams to question Naughty Dog and Sony's relationship behind the scenes.
