By now, the history of Crash Bandicoot, and the legendary importance of the despised PlayStation platformer, has been fairly well documented. With Sony's PlayStation going up against the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64, in the era of Mario and Sonic, early console makers felt they were in dire need of a mascot. And here came Crash, from a small, upstart, still technically independent studio of just a handful of people, and at just the right time. Shortly before the May 1995 E3 show, Sony was so impressed with Naughty Dog's demo that it pulled Twisted Metal from its main booth and replaced that game, which it had just signed, with Crash Bandicoot, right in front of Nintendo's booth, where Sony's rival had arrived with a new 3D platform game of its own, Super Mario 64. Shigeru Miyamoto was seen happily giving Crash a spin at the fair, the game was a bestseller, and The PS1 lived happily ever after.
The pet side is a factor, no doubt. But a less discussed legacy of Crash is the shift in focus it marked between companies like Nintendo and Sony. Where Nintendo opted for something less graphically appealing in Mario 64 (ever wonder why PS1 graphics have resurfaced in today's art styles, while no one is really trying to look like an N64 game?), but one where those Slightly simpler graphics allowed for more expansive and inventive gameplay. Mario 64 was the game that broke platform gaming wide open. Meanwhile, Crash Bandicoot effectively did the opposite.
As cartoony as they are, Crash's visuals were also richly detailed for the time, increasing the density while keeping the gameplay fairly simple – developers Naughty Dog have spoken about their desire at the time to jump on the growing action bandwagon. characters and also to effectively recreate a game they loved, Donkey Kong Country, in 3D, while jokingly nicknamed the new camera view position “Sonic's Ass.” A lot of time has passed between the release of Crash Bandicoot in 1996 and Sony's modern blockbuster strategy for PS4 onwards, with plenty of games in between, but there's also a thread that can be traced through them, from then to now. . The division between Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot effectively marks a delimitation of styles that has continued during those almost 30 years. A simplified version: on the one hand, an emphasis on mechanical gameplay and invention, at the expense of graphical prowess; on the other, a drive for technical and visual wonder, with more familiar and proven gameplay to accompany it. You can see the divide, arguably now more than ever, in Nintendo and Sony's first-party games today.
Obviously that's a bit on-simplifying. But even beyond that legacy there is also a third part of Crash's lasting influence, which I think is also probably the most interesting (and honestly, probably the funniest too). And that legacy is a very strange contradiction: a lot of people love Crash Bandicoot, and a lot of people also think it's not very good.
For a long time I've always approached this as some kind of debate: do you love Crash or do you think Crash is bad. More recently I have realized something very obvious, which I should have realized a long time ago, and that is that it is actually very possible that both things are true. Or perhaps more precisely: it's possible to love a game, know it's bad, and still believe it's good, too. It's just good in a different way.
Even then it is tempting to fall into trite arguments. It's as good as a popcorn movie! It's low art! It's ironically good! Tempting, but I don't think any of these would work well with Crash. Crash is both good and not so good: not so good because, let's face it, it's a little derivative; As many of its critics will be happy to tell you, it didn't really do anything special in terms of the actual platform itself. And it was a bit tricky: most platform games struggle with buoyancy and imprecision; Crash's near pixel-perfect platforms and the requirements to master them are, if anything, almost also accurate. And, as it's easy to forget with somewhat watered-down remasters, some of his stylistic decisions were largely weather. These aren't “it's just meant to be a popcorn movie” type themes, where you can dismiss them as part of the charm and move on. They're just problems.
But! Here is the magic. There's another way something can be brilliant: specifically, how video games can be brilliant. The other day, while browsing Bluesky (stay with me, reader), I saw an excerpt from an interview with Willem Dafoe. Dafoe is talking about film and the idea of naturalism in acting (this is suddenly going to be a lot of controversy, so again, stay with me) and he has this to say:
“…we don't just want to see imitations of life. We want to see something that is beyond that. Cinema is not just about telling stories. Everyone clings to this. Telling stories, telling stories, telling stories! It's about light. It's about space. It's all about tone. It's about color. It's about people having experiences in front of you, where, if it's transparent enough, they can experience them. with you. You become them. They become you. That is communion. That's the experience.”
Listen, I warned you.
The thing is, since I'm forever doomed to have to think about this hobby at all times, always, this got me thinking about video games, and what their own form of “communion” might be. And as I have become older, softer, and more likely to have the things I loved as a child, suddenly and rudely turning 20, 25, 30 before my eyes, the form of that communion has become a little clearer. .
These are games that are not, I would say, particularly good. You can probably see where I'm going. They are not good but they are also good. so well (some people might question that with Bennet Foddy's entry, and that's fine. Sub on Flappy Bird). They are games of massive, strange, and revolutionary virality because, despite their apparent trashiness, they are doing what the forgotten category of great game does: making you try, try, try. Making you scream and laugh, and making you fight against your friend's grip on the controller for one more turn. And make people who don't normally play video games in the same way that many people who read a website like Eurogamer play video games feel a sudden compulsion to participate. Mothers, fathers, siblings and that partner who still thinks they are immature. You put Perfect Pitch Filter in front of them after a long, impassive family lunch and watch them barely press “fah” and fail to press “soh,” and then they fail and fail and fail to press “soh” and tell me there isn't even a bit of magic happening here. There is something strange, mythical and evolutionarily compelling happening, in the same inexplicable and reflexive vein as hiccups, tickles and laughter.
This is our communion, here in our strange and undoubtedly immature corner of the art world (that friend was kind of right). I don't have the words to describe it (I'm not Willem Dafoe), but I think it's there. The clue is in the word.
I should probably talk a little bit about Crash Bandicoot. I love this game. I love its sequels, I love Crash Team Racing, I love its jagged edges and its scorching clash of colors and the low-quality audio of the now immortal Crash meme.Wow!” and above all, it is insufferable, exasperating, impossible. [expletive] levels like Road to Nowhere. I love the way the black backgrounds of its many tombs ignite in me the same haunting call to the void as the older Mario platformers that came before it, and how, at the same time, those games feel like they're a million miles away. of separate worlds. It's easy to get a little overly sensitive here and drift into memories: memories of the first consoles, of playing again with parents or siblings, of Christmas, of the '90s, of gaming simply on discs, of simpler times. To do so would be to miss the point a bit.
It's not the memories that make Crash special to so many people, but the things that made him memorable. Whatever that communion is, however it occurs, in a way that gets people sharing games, watching them, playing them in front of millions online, or just passing the notebook with that unlikely convert on the couch at home, Crash Bandicoot I had it. If we're tracing legacies, trace one from there to the brave new world of gaming today. The Roblox kids, Sisyphus, and the rest are distancing themselves from the graphics, the bombast, and the “storytelling,” rejecting those games and returning, in their own strange, modern way, to pure gaming itself, however that's defined. . Follow that thread and whether you like it or not, you have to admit that Crash was at least a little bit good. Their good old days will be like ours.