However, before E3 1996 all we saw were a couple of screen shots – and that only a few weeks before. Does anyone remember Floating Runner? But Mario, that wasn’t going to suck. Hell, we’d been pouring over even the slightest rumor – hotly debated at the 3am deli takeout diners. Rumors going into E3 spoke of Nintendo’s new machine, the misleadingly named N64 (it’s really 32 bit) and Miyamoto’s terrifying competitive shadow, Mario 64.įor two years we had been carefully studying every 3D character game. Heading into the 1996 E3 (May/June) we at Naughty Dog were working ourselves into oblivion to get the whole game presentable. While Sony never officially declared us their mascot, in all practical senses we became one. Management shakeups at Sony slowed the process, but by March of 1996 Sony and Universal had struck a deal for Sony to do the publishing.
CRASH BANDICOOT CD TV
Around Thanksgiving 1995, I and one of our artists, Taylor Kurosaki, who had a TV editing background, took footage from the game and spent two days editing it into a 2 minute “preview tape.” We deliberately leaked this to a friend at Sony so that the brass would see it. One of the dirty secrets of the Sony “developer contract” was that unlike its more common “publisher” cousin, it didn’t require presentation to Sony during development, as they assumed we’d eventually have to get a publisher.
But we had kept the whole project pretty under wraps. So much so that many viewers thought it a trick. The combination of our pre-calculation, high resolution, high poly-count, and 30 fps animation gave it a completely unique look on the machine. Now, winter 95-96 the game was looking very cool, albeit very much a work-in-progress. They remained a great source of cheap fun, and I scratch my head at the decision to move on. As one of our Crash 2 programmers used to say, “the sounds make the game look better.”įor some reason, years later, when we got around to Jak & Daxter we dropped the crate concept as “childish,” while our friends and amiable competitors at Insomniac Games borrowed them over into Ratchet & Clank.
The wumpa slurp and the cha-ching of the one up are priceless. He managed to dig up the zaniest and best sounds.
This was all sold by the sound effects, executed by Mike Gollom for Crash 1-3. One of the best things about the crates is that you could smash a bunch, slurp up the contents, and 5-10 seconds later the wumpa and one-ups would still be ringing out. I coded them again and again, going for a pinball machine like ringing up of the score. We also kept working on the feel and effects of crate smashing and pickup collection. We even used them as the basis for our bonus levels (see above video). Plus, in typical game fashion tempting crates could be combined with in game menaces for added gameplay advantage. Over the next few days we threw crates into the levels with abandon, and formally dull spots with nothing to do became great fun. The stacking logic that let them fall down on each other, or even bounce on each other. Normal, life crate, random crate, continue crate, bouncy crate, TNT crate, invisible crate, switch crate. So that Saturday we scrapped whatever else we had planned to do and I coded the crates while Jason modeled a few, an explosion, and drew some quick textures.Ībout six hours later we had the basic palate of Crash 1 crates going. They could explode, they could bounce or drop, they could stack, they could be used as switches to trigger other things. How much lower poly could you get? Crates could hold stuff. We’d been thinking about the objects in various puzzle games. We knew we needed something else, and we knew it had to be low polygon, and ideally, multiple types of them could be combined to interesting effect. One Saturday, January 1996, while Jason and I were driving to work (we worked 7 days a week, from approximately 10am to 4am – no one said video game making was easy).
CRASH BANDICOOT CD SERIES
We’d created the wumpa fruit pickup (carefully rendered in 3D into a series of textures - burning a big chunk of our vram - but allowing us to have lots of them on screen), and they were okay, but not super exciting.Įnter the crates. 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. But even once the core gameplay worked, these cool levels were missing something.
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