Crash Bandicoot’s true legacy? All the usual games we love
By now, the history of Crash Bandicoot – and the legendary significance of this PlayStation platformer – is fairly well documented. With the Sony PlayStation facing off against the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64, the era of Mario and Sonic saw debut console makers feel they desperately needed a mascot. And here comes Crash, from a small, start-up, still technically independent studio of just a few people, at just the right time. Just before E3 in May 1995, Sony was so impressed with Naughty Dog’s demo that it pushed Twisted Metal off the main booth and replaced that game it had just signed with Crash Bandicoot, standing directly across from Nintendo’s booth, where rival Sony was presenting new 3D platformer of his own – Super Mario 64. Shigeru Miyamoto was seen happily rocking Crash in the game. show, the game sold like gangbusters, and the PS1 lived happily ever after.
Undoubtedly, one of the factors is the mascot. But Crash’s less-discussed legacy is the shift it marked in approaches between companies like Nintendo and Sony. Where Nintendo went with something less visually appealing in Mario 64 (have you ever wondered why the PS1 graphics have been revived in modern art styles while no one is actually trying to look like an N64 game?) , but where these slightly simpler graphics allowed for more expansive and inventive gameplay. Mario 64 was the game that broke platforming wide open. Meanwhile, Crash Bandicoot actually did the opposite.
As cartoonish as they were, Crash’s visuals were also richly detailed for the time, maintaining density while keeping the gameplay fairly simple: developers Naughty Dog spoke of their desire at the time to join in with the characters’ growing popularity, as well as effectively recreate in 3D his favorite game Donkey Kong Country, while jokingly calling the new camera position the view of “Sonic’s Ass.” There’s been a lot of time between the release of Crash Bandicoot in 1996 and Sony’s modern, blockbuster-heavy strategy since the PS4, with plenty of games in between, but there’s also a thread that can be traced through them, from then to now. The split between Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot effectively marks a division of styles that has continued for nearly 30 years. Simplified version: on the one hand, an emphasis on mechanical playfulness and inventiveness at the expense of graphical perfection; on the other hand, a desire for technical and visual admiration, accompanied by more familiar, proven gameplay. Today you can see the split, perhaps now more than ever, in Nintendo and Sony’s own games.
Obviously it’s a little over-simplifying. But even beyond this heritage there is also third It’s part of Crash’s lasting influence that I think is also probably the most interesting (and, frankly, probably the most fun). And that legacy is a very strange contradiction: a lot of people love Crash Bandicoot, but a lot of people also think it’s not very good.
For a long time, I always approached this as a sort of debate: do you like Crash or do you think Crash is bad. Just recently I realized something very obvious that I should have realized a long time ago, which is that both of these things may in fact be true. Or perhaps more accurately: you can love a game, know it’s bad, and still believe it’s also good. It’s just good in a different way.
Even then, there is a temptation to enter into well-worn arguments. It’s good, like a good popcorn movie! This is low art! Oddly enough, this is good! Tempting, but I don’t think any of them really get Crash right. Crash is both good and not so good: not so good because, let’s face it, it’s a bit derivative – as many of its critics will happily tell you, it didn’t do anything special in terms of platforming itself. And it was a little awkward – most platformers suffer from floatiness and imprecision; The almost perfect platformer Crash and the requirements for mastering it, at least almost too much accurate. And, as it’s easy to forget given the somewhat toned down remasters, some stylistic decisions were very that time. These aren’t “it’s just a popcorn movie” problems, where you can shrug them off as part of the charm and move on. These are just problems.
But! That’s the magic. There’s another way something can be shiny—especially the way video games can be shiny. While scrolling through Bluesky the other day—stay with me, reader—I saw an excerpt from an interview with Willem Dafoe. Dafoe is talking about cinema and the idea of naturalism in acting – this is suddenly going to get very arrogant, so again, please stay with me – and he has this to say:
“…we don’t just want to see an imitation of life. We want to see something that is outside What. Cinema is not just about telling stories. Everyone clings to it. Let’s tell stories, tell stories, tell stories! It’s about light. We’re talking about space. It’s about tone. It’s about color. It’s about people having their experience right in front of you, and if it’s transparent enough, they can get through it. With You. You become them. They become you. This is communication. It’s an experience.”
Listen, I warned you.
The thing is, since I’m forever doomed to think about this hobby, it always, always makes me think about video games and what their own form of “communication” might be. And as I’ve gotten older, softer, and more inclined to have what I loved as a child suddenly and brutally fulfilled before my eyes at 20, 25, 30, the shape of that communication has become a little clearer. .
Think about the popular video games today—and not just the popular ones in terms of sales or critical reviews. Popular in terms of being talked about, watched, shared and also played. If a certain algorithm has even remotely picked up on your interest in video games, chances are that when you go to Tiktok, Instagram, Twitch or YouTube, you’ve probably seen footage of at least one of Chained Together, or the Perfect Pitch filter, or that game in where you drive a huge truck down an impossibly small, awkwardly sprawling mountain road while a line of buses moves in the other direction. Or “The Game of Sisyphus”. Or get over it with Bennett Foddy.
These are games that I would say are not particularly good. You can probably see where I’m going. They’re not good, but they are too So ok (some people might dispute this given Bennett Foddy’s record, and that’s fine. Sub in Flappy Bird). These are games of enormous, weird, incredible virality because, despite their seeming crap, they do what the forgotten category of great games does: make you try and try and try. Will make you scream and laugh, and will also make your friend grab the controller for another turn. And makes people who don’t normally play video games, like many people who read websites like Eurogamer play video games, feel a sudden urge to get involved. Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and that one man who still considers himself immature. You put the Perfect Pitch filter in front of them after a long and stolid family dinner and watch as they barely hit F and can’t hit C and then fail and fail and fail. failure press “oh” and tell me there’s no magic happening here. There is nothing strange, mythical, evolutionarily attractive, as inexplicable, reflexive as hiccups, tickling and laughter.
This is our communication here in our strange and undoubtedly immature corner of the art world (this friend was kind of right). I don’t have words for it – I’m no Willem Dafoe – but I think it’s there. The clue is in the word.
I guess I should talk a little about Crash Bandicoot. I love this game. I love its sequels, I love Crash Team Racing, I love its jagged edges, searing color clashes and the low-quality audio to Crash’s song, which is now forever etched in memes.”Wow!” and above all, there are the unbearable, infuriating, impossible (expletive) levels like Road to Nowhere. I love how the pitch black backgrounds of many of the tombs ignite in me the same eerie call to the void that the oldest Mario platformers did before it, and how at the same time these games seem to be divided into a million worlds. It’s easy to get sappy and lose yourself in memories: memories of the first consoles, new games with parents or siblings, Christmas, the 90s, games that were only on disc, simpler times. This will just miss the point slightly.
It’s not the memories that make Crash special to many people, but what it is about him that makes him memorable. Whatever that communication was, however it was caused by people sharing games, watching games, playing them in front of millions online, or simply passing a notepad to one incredible convert on the couch at home, Crash Bandicoot had it. If we’re looking for a legacy, trace it back to the brave new world of video games today. The children of Roblox, Sisyphus and the rest are moving away from graphics, bombast and “storytelling”, rejecting these games and returning, in their own strange, modern ways, to the purest game, however it is defined. Keep an eye on this thread and whether you like it or not, you have to admit that Crash was at least a little good. Their good old days will be just like ours.