By now, the history of Crash Bandicoot – and the bejorted platformer’s fabled importance to the PlayStation – has been pretty well documented. With Sony’s PlayStation facing off against the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64, there in the era of Mario and Sonic the debut console-makers felt they badly needed a mascot. And here came Crash, from a small, upstart, still technically independent studio of just a handful of people, and just at the right moment. Shortly before the E3 show of May 1995, Sony was so impressed with Naughty Dog’s demo it bumped Twisted Metal off its main stand and replaced that game, which it had only just signed, with Crash Bandicoot – pitching up directly across from Nintendo’s booth, where Sony’s rival had come with a new 3D platformer of its own, in Super Mario 64. Shigeru Miyamoto was seen happily giving Crash a whirl at the show, the game sold like gangbusters, and the PS1 lived happily ever after.
The mascot side of things is one factor, undoubtedly. But a less-discussed legacy of Crash is the shift in approaches it marked between the likes of Nintendo and Sony. Where Nintendo opted for something less graphically appealing in Mario 64 (ever wonder why PS1 graphics have had a resurgence in the art styles of today, while nobody’s really trying to look like a game from the N64?), but one where those slightly simpler graphics allowed for more expansive, inventive gameplay. Mario 64 was the game to blow the platformer wide open. Crash Bandicoot, meanwhile, effectively did the opposite.
Cartoony as they are, Crash’s visuals were also richly detailed for the time, packing in the density while keeping the gameplay fairly simple: the developers of Naughty Dog have spoken about their desire at the time to hop onto the growing character action bandwagon and also to effectively recreate a game they’d loved, Donkey Kong Country, in 3D, while jokingly nicknaming the new camera position the “Sonic’s Ass” view. A lot of time has passed between Crash Bandicoot’s release in 1996 and the modern, blockbuster-laden PS4-onwards strategy of Sony today, with a lot 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 out a delineation in styles that’s continued for those almost 30 years. A simplified version: on the one hand, an emphasis on mechanical playfulness and invention, at the expense of graphical prowess; on the other, a drive for technical and visual awe, with more familiar, tried-and-tested gameplay to go alongside it. You can see the split, arguably now more than ever, in the first-party games of Nintendo and Sony today.