Crash Bandicoot first appeared on the PlayStation back in 1996, and was quickly given the mantle of mascot character for that system. This was never really an official designation though, since Crash wasn’t a Sony internally developed character in the same way that Sonic and Mario were for Sega and Nintendo. It was developed by Naughty Dog, who have since left Crash Bandicoot behind and moved on to the Jak and Daxter series.

Gameplay wise, the original Crash game was a fairly standard platformer. You could jump and spin wildly, Tazmanian Devil style, which were both methods of killing the enemies and smashing the copious number of crates dotted round the levels. Most of these crates contained apples, and collecting 100 gave you an extra life. Each of the levels could also be revisited to try and collect all the apples on the level and to find hidden gemstones. Whilst the game may not have been very original, it did play extremely well and plugged the hole for a decent platform game which the PlayStation was currently lacking at the time. Probably the standout levels were those where you were running towards the camera whilst being followed by an Indianna Jones style ball of rock.

Two platforming sequels followed, with the addition of vehicles and a reorganisation of the levels into a hub based system being the major changes. Crash Team Racing followed, which was basically a Super Mario Kart clone, but again a very good, highly playable game. There was a large hub world which you drove around to find the different tracks to be played, and each track once it had been won could be replayed to get the fastest time and to find the letters C,T and R to gain that hard to reach 100% rating. Crash Team Racing has a lot to answer for however, since it kickstarted the idea of making karting games based around a particular pantheon of characters, and some of these copies have been quite poor, to put it mildly.

Crash Team Racing was the last Crash game to be delevoped by Naughty Dog, but Crash is still going strong on PS2 and XBox and also on the handhelds, especially Game Boy Advance. Quite how Crash is supposed to be a Bandicoot remains a mystery however, since he looks nothing like a real Bandicoot which is a small Australian marsupial, a bit like a rabbit. As the image here shows, it’s quite a big leap from reality to game world that Crash has made!

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