10 Things You Didn't Know About 'Crash Bandicoot'

One of the biggest achievements of the series was teaching a whole generation what the hell as ‘bandicoot’ is. But Crash was originally a wombat named Willie, which sounds like a really lame CBeebies character. Then Naughty Dog saw sense and changed it.

Crash Bandicoot was one of the first attempts to create a 3D version of classic side-scrollers like Mario Bros. and Sonic. And when Naughty Dog were first planning out the game, the developers nicknamed it ‘Sonic’s Ass’, because, well, the new perspective meant you’d be looking at his behind most of the time.

One of the most iconic bits of Crash are the levels where a big boulder is rolling towards you and you run towards the screen to get away from it. You might have thought that was just a hat tip to Indiana Jones, but actually they came about because Naughty Dog were worried that player would not connect with the character if they couldn’t see his face. So they added in levels where he was looking back at you.

When the game was been first developed, Universal Cartoon Studios created this traditionally animated intro in the style of a Saturday morning cartoon, complete with a cheesy theme song (The first games were co-published by Universal Interactive, hence Universal Cartoon Studios' involvement). It was possibly going to be used as an opening cinematic, or even as a pitch for a TV show, but it was abandoned when Sony wanted to push the 3D aspect of the game. The footage went unseen until 2015, when it was leaked online.

Crash’s girlfriend in the first game was a shapely bandicoot called Tawna, who looked like she’d stepped out of furry remake of an R Kelly video. Apparently her design was toned down as Universal Interactive thought she was too suggestive for a family game, and for the second the female lead role was replaced by Crash’s girl-next-door-type sister Coco.

Japan obviously has its own videogame culture, which means that Western games don’t traditionally do well over there. But Crash was one of the few American titles to be a big hit (partly down to significant localisation, including altering some of the music, cover art and difficulty levels).

A good example of how popular Crash was in Japan was that he actually had his own spin-off manga. Crash Bandicoot: Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken was loosely based Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, and ran for two volumes.​

You known that dance crash does when he completes a level? That was actually designed for the Japanese advertising campaign, and a man in a Crash suit did it some very weird Japanese commercials. It caught on though, and was added into the games from the sequel onwards.

Crash has done so much to create awareness of the bandicoot in popular culture. So much, that when scientists found a fossilised remains of previous unknown ancestor of the marsupial, the even binomial name of crash bandicoot.