Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 350: Crash Bandicoot

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and John Linneman of Digital Foundry smash, bash, dash, and splash their way through the jungles of video game history to excavate the history behind Sony's most beloved mascot hero. No, not Blasto. We're talking' Crash! Cover art by Shaan Khan.

This week in Retronauts, it's the real spin-dizzy world. 50, kind of a round number, a very fancy number of retronauts. And I am Jeremy Parrish. And this week, we are working outside my comfort zone to a certain degree, but that's okay because I have experts to help me. So again, I am Jeremy Mirkat Parrish and some marsupials on the line with me. There's one in the UK. Introduce yourself. Hello, I'm Stuart Jip. And usually, again, I try and think of a related crash bandicoot joke, but unfortunately I've been completely unable to. So I'm just going to say, whoa. Whoa. All right. And, uh, actually, where are you based? Germany, right?

Yeah, I'm in Germany. Okay. And you are, mysterious voice from Germany. This is John Linumann from Digital Foundry. All right. Thank you both for joining me here on this imaginary telephone call. We're not using telephones. That's why it's imaginary. But we are going to have a real conversation about Crash Bandicoot. Uh, the series, the legacy, the, the, bandicoot himself, perhaps, and also the series continuation after 20 years. We're pretending all those games in between Crash 3 and Crash 4 did not actually happen. That's right. It's revisionist history in action. You're hearing it right here, right now on this podcast, on episode 350 of Retronauts. It's worked out pretty well because I've also been pretending

they never happened. Exactly. So I think everyone's in accord on this. So, yeah, A fourth, like, canonically fourth Crash Bandico game was recently released back in October. And my intention was actually to have this episode out in time for that. But, you know, the year 2020 was not very cooperative on many fronts. And things didn't work out. So we're a little belated. But on the other hand, instead of this being like a, boy, I hope Crash 4 is good kind of podcast, we can definitively say, whether or not crash four was good at this point.

I believe both of you have played it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I've watched some trailers for it, so we're all, we're all the same page here. The same experience. That's right. It's totally equivalent. No, like I said, 2020 has not been cooperative in any respect, so I have not had time to play Crash 4 or pretty much any, like, any game that I'm writing reviews on or, you know, retrospectives on.

I don't get to play anything anymore. I'm like, I think this was probably good. and let me tell you what I read on Wikipedia. Just kidding, folks. I don't actually do that. Anyway, so, yeah, the Crash Bandicoot series goes back to the very first game came out in 1996, like three weeks before Super Mario 64, which is a very interesting kind of coincidence because I think it kind of worked counter to the creator's plans for the series.

They thought it was going to be a revolution of video gaming, and instead it was just pretty neat. But it still did really well for them for them. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. And I think it's actually a very, very important time. And we'll talk more about this. But if you weren't there, 3D platformers basically didn't exist up until around this point. So all of these games, when they started development, they had nothing to work from.

So what we see is a bunch of different visions from different companies all kind of releasing in around 1996. And this is just one of the unique forks that the genre took. Yes, literally Forks. That's kind of the gimmick with the level design. But yes, if you look at autumn 1996, basically the big three, the big three platform manufacturers, the first parties, each had their own take on the 3D platformer. Nintendo, of course, had Mario 64, which is definitely the more influential of the games. For sure. Crash Bandicoot was Sony's bid, even though it wasn't actually a Sony developed game. they were like, you know, fully, fully supporting it, except for the Japanese side of Sony who was kind of like, what an ugly guy, which isn't wrong. And I would say it is the most technically finessed version, the most technically finessed take on the platform, 3D platform genre to come up that year. And then Sega had Knights into Dreams, which I still don't know what to make at that game.

It's been almost, it's been 25 years now, and I just, I don't know. I can't with Knights and I really have tried. I just can't. So it actually took me years to Master Nights. It's a complicated game, but once you understand how it works, it does click. I can tell you that much. I just find I fly around and then the perspective randomly changes and I put my controller through a wall. The whole thing is just, it kind of breaks that need of a platform where the rules should be simple and clear.

And, you know, so yeah, I can understand the confusion. Yeah, there's probably an entire episode about Knights and, you know, just kind of what's it was doing in that era, but definitely, you know, kind of moving away from pure arcade adrenaline in favor of like, you know, things like virtual fighter RPG becoming shin moo and Knights into Dreams coming out of Sonic, basically. So, yeah, kind of strange. But Crash Bandicoot has a pure vision, and that is, let's look at Sonic's ass in 3D. And it worked out pretty well for them, I would say. Each of the PlayStation games, the three, the three platformers on PlayStation has sold like seven or eight million copies apiece, that's pretty good.

They did okay for themselves. And as we discuss, as we will discuss, they actually did pretty well in Japan, which was kind of unheard of for a Western developed game during that era. That's because they de-ugled crash. And Japan was like, oh, he's Kauai. That's, that's Daijobu. It's all good. Okay, so, yeah, basically this episode, I'd like to do a little bit of background on Sonic and on Naughty Dog, the developer, or Sonic, Jesus, Crash.

I was just like, whoa. surprise everyone it's a stealth sonic episode yeah um so we're going to talk about crash's background and naughty dog and um then you know talk about the the crash trilogy on playstation especially focused on the tech that's i think something john can speak to you put together some some great pieces um i wasn't able to find anything on your channel digital foundries channel on just on the the PlayStation trilogy themselves but a lot of comparisons of the PS1 trilogy versus the remake from a few years back. Yeah, I never got to do a dedicated retro episode on Crash. I mean, I'm sure there will be opportunities at some point.

This is a good chance to discuss it. Yes, okay. And then we'll talk a little bit about Crash 4. And I guess we can talk about the wilderness years before Crash came back and Satan was, you know, tempting him to like jump off buildings and stuff. I think that's what happened during the wilderness years. I can't wait to finally talk about Crash Boom Bang on the Nintendo DS because it's been my life's journey to get to this point. Okay.

Finally, it's going to be a thing. Honestly, you know, looking over the list of Crash Games to just kind of put together a list for this episode of things to briefly talk about in the wilderness years, there were, okay, these games came out when I was in the Games press, and this was kind of my beat, and I have never heard of some of these games. It's really... I'm surprised you missed the portable games, to be honest. Like, I've heard of twin sanity, but Crash of the Titans and Mind Over Mutant, I honestly, like, I did not know those existed. So there's definitely a kind of an awareness gap between Crash 3 and Crash 4. So we will talk about that.

All right. So, background. My question I put to you is, where did this horrible little creature come from in the first place? Do you mean, do you want the canon answer or do you want the answer from like what actually happened in real life? Actually, the canon answer would be great. I think in canon he was created by the villainous Doctinio cortex as part of some kind of weird, not very brilliantly defined experiment. But then he escaped and decided to wreck him, I guess. I didn't really pay much attention to the plot because, you know, who cares?

It's mostly just a guy collecting apples and breaking boxes. And I know they're not really apples. I just had that to irritate fans. I'm sorry. Yeah, they're called like cupa fruits or something. Not cupa. Wompa. They're called Wompa fruits.

Wompa fruits. That's it. That's Star Wars, not Mario. Big difference. Yeah. So a lot of the inspiration for Crash came from other platformers, obviously. Like, Nottie Dog was really kind of, I wouldn't say coloring within the lines, but they were taking kind of what existed.

out there, especially Sonic the Hedgehog and Donkey Kong Country and trying to redefine it for 3D. And, you know, the approach they took was very different than the approach Nintendo and Sega took, but it was much more focused, as I said before. And as a result, like the premise for this game, the first game, is very much along the lines of Sonic the Hedgehog where Dr. Is he Dr. Robotnik, Dr. Egman, which is he now? He's both.

He's both. He can be either. It doesn't matter. Robot Eggman wants to, like, kidnap all the animals and turn them into robots so that he can take over the world. This is kind of like that. This is Dr. Neo-Cortex, who is voiced by Niles, right, from Frazier. Am I thinking? Am I remembering that correctly? I don't know.

Whoever does voice him, because I think he's had several voices, but whoever does voice him is an absolute treasure to listen to. I love listening to. And that's actually the key here, though, is that there is that there is. voice acting. So all the storytelling that we're kind of covering here, this was all told through actual animated cutscenes and they had real voice actors doing the lines, which was kind of new for this genre, I think. We didn't really see a lot of that.

And beyond that, you know, I think Crash's look, feel, design, backstory, it is kind of like taking elements from famous games such as Sonic and Donkey Kong Country was an inspiration. But it's all done through the lens of like loony tunes or like. classic American cartoons. You know what I mean? Yeah. And in fact, a big part of Crash's appeal is the fact that Noddy Dog was in cahoots with Universal at this time. Like, basically they gave them way of the warrior for 3DO in Universal's game division was like, hey, you guys should just, you know, move over here and make video games for us in L.A.

So they were working on Universal's lots, basically. And so they had access to really talented animators who, you know, did animated movies for Universal. And so you brought that kind of Disney-esque, you know, Don Bluth-style comical sensibility to crash in his design and his animations. And it really does give you that Looney Tunes sensation in a way that you really didn't see in other games at that point. There was a pilot produced, I think, for a Saturday morning Crash Bandicoot TV show as well, like a cartoon.

But by all account... What's up with that? though, Stewart, because it feels like every mascot back then received at least a pilot episode of a potential cartoon. It's on them failed. There's a pitch on YouTube, I think. It's like a little musical thing. I think Jim Cummings is doing the voice on it. Oh, wow. By all accounts, it's wretched beyond imagination. But that answers your question, John. He did later turn up in Skylanders, the Skylanders' CGO cartoon, but that's a whole world away. They also made him absurd in that, like more absurd than the giant face with the pair of denim jeans could really be. Whatever. I mean, that was the wilderness years. We don't talk about those. Well, we do. We have to, unfortunately. But it's, yeah. Yeah, I think by the late 90s, the Saturday morning cartoon had more or less ceased to be a cultural force. So I think, you know,

the fact that they kept throwing these mascots, I don't know, Arrow the Acrobat or Punky Skunk or whatever, against the concept, just like, that was just a whole. over. It was like kind of reflexive behavior that didn't have any real bearing on life for anyone, basically. There's some area of the acrobat talent here. Dave Siller was involved in this game, I believe, to a fairly large extent. And he is the area of the acrobat's dad. So, yeah. That's right. That's why the game is so darn good. I mean, is there a paternity test to prove this? I hadn't heard anything about that. You don't need to with bats. Just don't ask.

Okay. explains a lot about Bruce Wayne. So basically, this was a distillation of a lot of platform gaming concepts that, again, as we've kind of mentioned, really sort of refocused them into a 3D style. And that, in this case, took the form of basically running into or out of the screen. And again, everyone else kind of had their own take on it. To this point, I think really the only significant 3D platformer I can think of that was out on the market. market would have been jumping flash, uh, by exact for PlayStation. And that's, that's kind of a different creature altogether. It's way platformier in the, in the sense that you're spending most of your time airborne.

You have a triple jump and each jump is like rocket powered. And then it has sort of these interstitial spaces where you're in first person shooter mode. So it's not really a pure platformer experience in the sense of like, it's a Mario. Uh, it's more of a, uh, it's more of a, uh, kind of hybrid, I don't know, it's its own thing. It's, we will have a jumping flash episode at some point. That's honestly what makes this time period so interesting to me is just the fact that we see all these new ideas for the first time.

And I think, you know, they've discussed this before, but, you know, fighting games, racing games are the things. There was a lot of types of games that made the transition to 3D where like that jump was fairly obvious. Like you understand, like racing games, for instance, a lot of them in 2D, they've always been designed to look three. They could just finally do it with polygons. But when you get to the platformer, as you can see from all of the first round of 3D platformers,

I mean, the rules hadn't been established and things like, okay, how do you handle the camera? How do you handle, like, collision? You know, how do you handle depth to ensure that the player can actually see where they're jumping? Like all of these questions, nothing had been answered yet. Yeah, and, you know, Crash came out just a few weeks after the original Tomb Raider. Yeah, that's, you know, that's not a mass. mascot platformer in the sense of Mario or Sonic, but it's still a character-driven platform-based action game.

And, yeah, that has a very different approach to dealing it with and navigating 3D spaces. It's much more in the Prince of Persia style, where it's very precise and very measured. Yeah, I've always, I agree with that. I've always kind of said that Tomb Raider was a continuation of, like, flashback, another world, Prince of Persia, games like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. This is obviously, like you say, a much more free-flowing, a high-speed platform game. It is pretty much a Donkey Kong country-style 2-D platformer with a 3-D camera.

And, of course, like, the original Crash Bandicoot, I mean, it feels like 50 to 60% of that game is in 2D anyway, to me. Like, there's so much. Yeah, it's true. And it's not much of a... I mean, it is a leap, but it's not a huge difference from your given Mega Drive or SNAS platformer, really, in terms of what you're actually asked to do. It's very... Once we get into the meat of the game. game, we'll have to talk about the three perspectives because, I mean, I guess technically there's

four, but there's basically like three or four different types of game in there where they alter the camera, which in turn alters the gameplay. And it's kind of interesting to see. Three Perspectives makes this the Roshamon of video games. So I'm very excited about that. Whose perspective is correct? I can't believe you didn't say, I'm actually quite upset. You didn't say Crashamon. It just seemed so obvious. It was like right there. Dang it. Yeah, but okay, so what I'm going to say is that Tomb Raider, you know, really feels like it hails from the, the PC development side of things,

from the computer gaming world, if you will. whereas, you know, Crash Bandicoot is much more in the console tradition. It's faster, more, you know, action-driven. And, you know, honestly, as you were saying, it is kind of 2D in a lot of ways. Obviously, it wouldn't have looked as good, but you could have put together a pretty convincing facsimile of this game, you know, functionally, mechanically, on super NES, just using Mode 7 effects. Because there's not a lot of, what do you call it, uh, changes in D. geography like height why can I know there is height there's plenty of height in this but you kind of don't need it you know what I mean you could still create a facsimile of this completely

just using a 2D plane and it would still I mean they kind of did on the game boy advanced they made a couple yeah exactly just straight up to exactly yeah it's just sprite scaling basically right so it's interesting that this kind of you know follows that console tradition because that's not where naughty dog began so we'll talk a little bit about the studio yeah the studio naughty dog is very different today than it was in 1996 um you know 25 years makes a big difference and now they are this lumbering behemoth maybe not lumbering but they are very large and are very much all about the prestige like give me awards kind of experiences such as the last of us whereas here they were just like basically eight dudes two of whom started the company

as school kids making kind of bad PC games and eventually learned how to program really well and developed an aptitude for game design. And so, you know, 10 years after their kind of junior high excopades, they were making pretty solid games. And they started out on PCs making, like I said, kind of bad games, but then they made an RPG, a comedy RPG in 1989 called Keefe the Thief. It sounds like someone has opinions. Oh, no, just when you said comedy RPG, I started thinking about the Bard's Tale reboot for the PS2

and just felt the pain, that's all. Well, yes, I put in the notes that a comedy RPG is one of gaming's most failure-prone concepts. And I think, you know, for the time, Keith the Thief worked out pretty well. I don't know that it's necessarily a game that you would want to go back to 30 years later, but you know it gave it kind of it it helped naughty dog put their their stake in the

ground they were actually called um jam studios which was jason and andy's magic software that's it yes jason that's right rubin and andy gavin uh i think keef the thief then was i think the first game where they actually used the name naughty dog right to reference their brand and they created a special logo for that and that one was actually published by electronic arts and i had to make this note it was produced by Michael Berlin, who would go on to create Bubsy. A hero. Ah, he took that comedy element and just ran with it.

That's important to note, because when we actually get to 1996, you know, the bubster makes a, makes a, makes a, oh, yeah. Was that 96? I believe it was. I thought, I thought Bubsy 3D was later. No. Okay, wow. It's timeless.

It doesn't matter when it was made. Um, so after Keep the Thief, Noddy Dog moved on to console development, uh, working on Sega Genesis with the RPG Rings of Power, which is, Notable, for one thing, for being a more of an Ultima style RPG than, you know, Fantasy Star Final Fantasy, it's more open world. It's also notable for having a cheat code for nudity. Sorry, sorry, sorry. No, that's okay. We were going to get there, but I guess everyone has to know about the breasts and rings of power. All right. So in terms of substance, it was interesting because it did bring a sort of PC development game design philosophy into a console RPG space, which you really didn't see outside of, of conversions of PC RPGs to consoles, things like Dracan or the Goldbox SSI game, terrible conversions for NES, that sort of thing.

You just didn't really see that mindset of like, here's kind of just a space, a sandboxy area, figure it out, go do your thing. So, you know, they were kind of bringing that PC mentality over. And then after that, they moved along to creating Way of the Warrior for 3DO, which was, you know, it was of its time. this one. I've played a lot of this, actually, because I do actually have multiple copies of it. Don't ask me why. But, I mean, everyone's got to have their weird quirk. This game's important, actually, for a lot of reasons. First of all, it started

the relationship with Universal Interactive. And this is actually where Mark Sarnie came into the picture, having created Marble Madness. He worked with the Sonic Team guys. He worked at STI, actually, at Sega. So he was involved in the creation of Sonic the Hitchock 2. I mean, everybody knows Mark Serney now, but he was already a big deal. back then, and they formed this relationship, and they began to work on a fighting game. This was post-mortal combat, so they wanted to do a digitized fighting game, but with 3D backgrounds. And why this is important is that this is kind of where they started down the path of creating

games to fill gaps. So, you know, they look at the market and say, okay, the 3DO, it's not the most popular console, not even that popular at all, but it did have some buzz. fighting games are huge. There's not really any fighting games in the 3DO. So what if we try to fill that gap by making one? And so by the fact that they were there with a game like this, even if it wasn't like a huge success or even a great game,

it got their name out there. Like, I mean, I remember seeing stuff for this game. And I think, you know, this just became associated with the 3DO. And it looked visually kind of impressive. And they even got a licensed white zombie soundtrack in there. It has a weird feel to it. Was Way of the Warrior the game where you can play as a Scottish fighter who lifts his kilt and shoots fireballs from under the kilt?

That is, I believe, a Kasumi Ninja on the Atari Jaguar. I was going to say, way of the warrior is very much in the same sort of milieu as Kusumi Ninja, but a much better game. Like Kusumi Ninja is kind of infamous for being like, here is a Mortal Kombat clone that is just pure ass. Yeah. And now here's a Sonic clone that's just pure ass.

You see? Ah, there you go. Oh, geez. Tying it together. You almost went over the line there. You almost got us in big trouble. So Way of the Warrior was, I guess, the first of a four-game run that they had signed to do with Universal. So obviously, after Way of the Warrior, from what they've written, Andy Gavin kind of noted

that they started looking at, okay, what can we do next to? build another gap. And they wanted to work in 3D and determined that they also wanted to make a platform game. And I guess that's kind of just like the onus. Like, okay, we're going to build a platform game. And that's when they started to explore the different platforms. Right. And it should be said that this decision was made sometime in early 1994. It was not a, it was not like Donkey Kong country came out and they started seeing, you know, preview shots for Super Mario 64 and we're like, oh, we got to do that. Like, this was before Donkey Kong Country 64, or Donkey Kong Country, just the first one,

before that one came out, before Mario 64 came out, or even was teased or announced. Like, I think maybe there were some rumblings of project reality, but no one knew what that was, aside from Jurassic Quality Park graphics in your home. Like, that was the promise. That was going to be it. That's what's going to happen. Yeah. So there was no kind of backdrop for them to build against it really was that is such an important point to stress here of the 16 bit generation was still like in full bloom when they decided to make this game and the fact that it would be just like a little over two years later that they would actually ship something and it would be good it's kind of remarkable especially considering that at this point they were still very very very small I mean it was pretty much just Andy and Jason for the most part.

and they would sort of beef up from there. I mean, all the way of the Warrior stuff, they filmed on a green screen in their apartment. I mean, this was not a big studio yet. And they actually left Massachusetts, I think, drove all the way across the country to California to work close to Universal just to make this game. Yeah, and it should be noted that, you know,

based on oral histories and just retrospectives on this game, it was made by an eight-person team. It's very, very tiny. Like, compare that to Naughty Dog. today, which is hundreds of people and has subcontractors and so on and so forth, it's, um, you know, it's, it's, it's just weird to think back like 25 years ago, you could make a basically tent pole title for a console with eight people. That just, you know, that doesn't happen anymore. And they were, they were an underdog in that sense, you know, naughty dog underdog,

but they really were. They weren't that well established. And they were attempting to go up against stuff like Nintendo and Sega. Right. And I, and I, that's, that's incredible. I would say that actually worked in their favor. They were not beholden to an existing property, an existing style. You know, Mario, I think, navigated the move to 3D really effectively. Like, Mario 64 is not perfect, but it was really, really kind of mind-blowing at the time. And it's still pretty fun to play, despite some camera frustrations and some control quirks. But Sonic did not navigate the move to 3D that era, that generation.

Bubsy I mean realistically Bubsy 3D is as good as the 2D Bubsy games but that's you know not saying a lot Whoa now Bubby isn't that bad actually They were brilliant

They were brilliant child Oh Stuart Stuart Stuart Precious Springchild Anyway the point is Like lots and lots of franchises Did not make that leap Successfully

But because Crash Bandicoot was not a franchise it was not an existing property. It did not have expectations and rules and designs and standards and a fan base to say like, hey, this isn't what I wanted from a 3D version of my game. This is this is Mega Man Legends, not Mega Man Classic. How dare you? They didn't have to deal with that. So they were able to come fresh out of the gate without preconceptions or expectations and deliver an experience that, you know, worked on its own terms. And I think that that really did work for Crash Bandicoot's benefit. And I think it also helped that Sony got behind Crash in a big way and really promoted it, brought it on as a first-party title that was really, really clever of them. They could have gone with Bubsy 3D. And imagine how poorly things would have gone for Sony at that point. Yeah, some of the stories, it seems like they were basically sharing footage of this and trying to like sort of sneak it over to some Sony guys because they were so confident

in their work. And I guess, you know, if you're Sony and you see something like this running on your hardware, you're immediately going to think, oh, well, we need to go after this. And that's basically what happened. Yeah, to give you a sense of, you know, kind of how small naughty dog was at the time and how big a risk they took on this, one of their oral histories, someone mentioned that basically they managed to be basically the one developer, not publisher, one developer who managed to get a hold of a PlayStation SDK dev kit. And it cost them $35,000, which was basically like what they had. They kind of went all in to get this one dev station. But, you know, because they were working with pretty much top of the line equipment at this point, you know, workstations and the Sony dev kit, that actually helped them attract talent from within Universal, you know, other people who are making games around the studio or, you know, working on like amigas and stuff said, whoa, you guys are using, you know, current technology.

That's wild. I'd like to work with you. Of course, they also said, and I thought this was interesting. know, PlayStation was not a foregone conclusion for them. They viewed this the same way they did when they opted to do Way of the Warrior on 3DO. They looked at the market. They determined, obviously, the 3DO was falling out of fashion and wasn't necessarily powerful enough to do this. They didn't want to work on the Saturn, both because Sega would be there with its own games, and it was difficult to use, apparently, as we know.

Nintendo still a ways off, and of course, you know, Nintendo is going to bring their best game, and they did. They did. So the PlayStation, there was just this potential there where you could see, like, okay, this seems like solid hardware. John, I can't believe you just totally ghosted Jaguar like that. How could you? I think they did, too, actually. If you read what Andy said. It was like, let's not even talk about Jaguar.

No PCFX. No. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it really was calculus coming to PlayStation, but it did make the most sense because Sony was kind of like Noddy Dog, you know, and Crash Bandicoot. They were starting from zero. I mean, Sony had Sony ImageSoft beforehand, but it's not like people were hankering for, oh, let's get Ukiote's hook in 3D, let's get, you know, cliffhanger with Stallone, let's get that on PlayStation. Like, nothing, nothing from Sony ImageSoft really translated over to PlayStation. It was basically a blank slate.

So, yeah, it was a great opportunity for this new studio, not new, but kind of like. Unproven, I guess. Yes. Unproven. This sort of up-and-coming studio, these plucky newcomers, to basically get a foot in the door. And it worked out. Yeah. And I guess it was good that they, you know, Sony did kind of need a mascot at the time. Obviously they had- Polygon Man wasn't good enough for you. Well, there was Polygon Man, but they had also tried like using like, I think Sophia or whatever from Toshenden as a mascot for a little while. I mean, they were throwing everything they could at the wall and just none of it was really sticking. Even though. the system was very successful. They just didn't have that established image. You are not ready for a dominatrix mascot character. No. No, not really. Or the Ridge Racer car. Actually, that's probably my favorite mascot of early PlayStation era. But, you know, I mean, I think probably the most bankable

character Sony had before Crash Bandicoot was Robert from Jumping Flash. And that's not, it's not that bankable a character. It's weird because Robert is, you know, he's a Japanese character. So you'd expect him to be like cute and lovable, but he's just kind of weird and alien and insectile. So you don't look at him and think, ah, now that's my kind of game system. And to their credit, Sony did kind of run with that. They weren't the cuddly mascot platform. They weren't, you know, like, here's your cartoon character, kids, enjoy. It was more like, hey, here's your bitch and dominatrix. She's going to crush you between her thighs whenever you boot up this system. Like that was, that was kind of their play, you know, for the, the horny teenagers and 20-year-olds, as opposed to, you know,

the 11-year-olds, the tweens that Sony and Sega were going for. Sony, Sega and Nintendo, my God, so many names to keep track of. So, yeah, this was, you know, again, filling a vacuum on PlayStation, even though at the time, I don't think they could have realized just how much of a mascot void there was on PlayStation. And it's interesting because this game kind of kicked off this this brief little surge of Universal being like really good at mascot platform action games because you also got Spyro from from Universal and the first couple of Spyro games were really good also. It was just kind of like a wow, weird, wacky. All right, so we keep talking about Sonic's ass.

Let's talk about that. Okay, but I don't know what this is. Oh, I see. Sorry, I thought you meant literally. Never mind. I mean, you know, whatever works for you, Sto. Okay. I mean, I would like to say I'm not an expert.

I would love to say I'm not. Okay. Well, I mean, so Sonic's ass. Anthropon was canceled this year. Sorry. Oh, man. That whole thing comes from, um, They basically called it this as, you know, when you think about a 3D platformer at the time, their idea was, okay, well, you're running into the camera, right?

It's 3D, which means you'll always be looking at the backside of the character. So obviously, that played a huge role, I think, in defining the look of crash. They needed to create a character specifically designed to be viewed from the rear so that would have a very visible silhouette. because, you know, Sonic and Mario, we know from development histories from the original creators that those characters were specifically designed to look the way they do based on the hardware of the time and the displays and everything, right? And it's exactly the same thing here with Crash, it seems. Yep.

Yeah, Crash, you know, we keep talking about how the game is about running into or out of the screen, and that is a conscious decision they made based on the tech capabilities of the PlayStation. Like, they originally thought, hey, why don't we have an open world, you know, going by their oral histories and their own accounts. Like, they were thinking more in terms of, you know, kind of the Mario 64 style, but they wanted a game that looked more lush and more, you know, densely populated with detail than what you would be able to do in an open style world. And, you know, you look at Mario 64, and it is a pretty open game, like lots of open

fields, and it's just kind of sparse and kind of thinly populated. whereas Crash Bandicoot, you know, it does have that kind of Donkey Kong country feel where it's a little bit dense and almost claustrophobic in the jungle with, you know, things crowding you. And the PlayStation just couldn't handle that kind of big open world and maintain a consistent frame rate. So they really locked it in on basically rails so that you're pretty much just running along a path. And you have, you know, opportunities to split along a different path. And, you know, there are, again, some changes in perspective.

but it's much more limited, and that allowed them to focus less on having to draw long distances and, you know, manage these open spaces and allowed them to create much denser detail. You know, there's a lot of shadow to kind of obscure pop up and draw in and things like that. And so what you end up with is a game that it does kind of have that distinct sort of late 90s PlayStation Saturn look to it, where everything seems a little grimy and dark. but, you know, I think it works really well. Like, you're kind of running through the, the dense canopy of the jungle or through, you know, darkness shrouded areas of a factory or something. And it creates atmosphere and it's very evocative.

And then on top of that, you know, Crash himself is this bright orange character who really pops out against the greens and the browns and the blacks of the jungle and temples and things like that. Yeah. And we should also mention, uh, he was originally. called Willie Wombat during development for most of the game. And it wasn't until they brought in the crate system, which was something that they seemingly designed to sort of fill the gaps between enemies, where you crash through the crates. And that ended up becoming the name they went with.

But I had to throw in the note that Willie Wombat did actually become a game. And it was released on the Saturn in 97 by Weststone. Yeah, I was. Wonderboy. Yeah. was published by Hudson. So I was, I was, I was positive when I was reading these oral histories, like, there was a Willie Wambachian.

Yeah, exactly. Why, why does that name sound so familiar? Okay. So, yes, that was Westone. Interesting. Yeah. But anyway, to get to the, to the visual side. So I really, I got to talk on this because this is, there's some really impressive stuff going on here.

This is, this is why you're here, man. Like, bring it home. So, like you said, you know, obviously they were focused on creating a very dense environment while Mario 64 took the opposite approach. And this is a very different thing. So I actually think PlayStation could render these very large areas like Mario 64, but due to the way the hardware works. So N64, it had perspective correction and you could do like texture filtering and all

this stuff. So you could actually have gigantic triangles. So on Mario 64, you could have a plane made of two huge triangles that you run across, right? That's only two polygons. So the worlds in that game were made up of very few polygons because the N64 could display them cleanly without issue. Whereas on PlayStation, if you wanted to do a level the size of Mario 64 and you use the

same two triangle setup due to affine texture swim, which is, you know, you guys recognize that, of course. It's a mathematical issue. The way it wobbles and sort of pulsates around. So the solution developers often came up with was to use many, many more polygons. So PlayStation games tend to have much higher polygon counts than N64. they needed to do this to overcome these issues. Yeah, you know, Nintendo never really released its specs for what the,

the N64 could do without all effects turned on or turned off. It was only like, yeah, here's, here's, you know, with everything on, here's what we can do. But they never said, you know, if you turn off all these extra features, here's what the hardware is capable of. And it led a lot of people to believe that, you know, just in terms of rendering polygons, the PlayStation was much more powerful. We know that's true now. Talking to actual developers that worked on them both,

the PlayStation absolutely can do that. And it had to to overcome its other weaknesses, which is why these two games are so unique. The PlayStation could not run Mario 64 as is, just like N64 could not run Crash Bandicoot as is. They're just so different. So some of the things that they did that were really special, though. First of all, for additional clarity,

they decided to run the game at 512 by 2.4. 40 resolution rather than the typical 320 by 240. So they actually used a higher resolution output mode. So it's much sharper. For all the characters then, both to save on memory and to create sort of a cleaner look, this is actually similar to Final Fantasy 7. They opted for untextured characters for the most part. I mean, they would put a couple texture details.

Yeah, they're gore-out shaded, right? Yeah, and they would use like vertex painting. So you would get like colors and shading on the edges, but they weren't actually using textures. And because of this, they actually hold up better than a lot of PlayStation-era characters because they're richly detailed, but they don't have those nasty textures that bend and warp when you get close to it. So it ends up really sort of fitting the cartoony look they were going for. And they have this advanced... I mean, if you don't feel, if you don't feel like you're drunk, are you really playing a PlayStation game? See, I've often wondered

this as well. So maybe that's why this doesn't feel like... But they're sort of untextured polygons and the sort of weird angular characters, they, to me, they just really fit as an art style. Yeah. Is Chuck Jones almost kind of late Chuck Jones, weirdly psychedelic kind of atmospheric feel like game has? It's super important. You mentioned that too,

because their animation system allowed them to sort of bend and warp the joints in interesting ways. So they could actually do these character animations where you would like say, they make a face. They can stretch the whole jaw wide open or like, you know, if he smacks into the ground, they can smush it together. So you do all this squash and stretch style animation on the character.

which is very Looney Tunes. And it seems simple now, but that was actually very technically impressive, that they were able to manipulate the characters, put facial animations in there. They could actually have, like, lip sync on that. Like, you didn't see this stuff. Even like in Mario 64, the characters didn't have expressions like this. So to be able to do these fully animated, like expression-packed characters was impressive. And then on top of that, there's the world.

So it does push a lot of geometry, but the level. levels themselves were too big and would have been too big for the place to display all at once. So they actually made pioneering efforts in terms of how occlusion calling is handled. Are you guys familiar with this? I'm not, but I can figure out what it means based on the name. I'm not, but go ahead and explain it better than I could by, you know, spitballing it. I'm going to pretend that I am and just kind of go, hmm, yeah.

I mean, so this is every game does this now. But the idea is you don't want to be drawing extra triangles than you need to. So things that are occluded from view are not drawn, whether it's from outside of your viewing area, the camera frustum, or it's simply an object is hitting behind another object. So you're trying to save resources by determining what you draw or do not draw. But a lot of this stuff wasn't really set in stone back there. It was very, very new. So Naughty Dog came up with a really interesting way to handle this, and they pre-calculated a lot of this, as I understand from some of the reading, where these levels were able to have some. so much detail, but everything was very carefully placed in design so that it was never

revealing more detail than the system could handle. So everything was kind of perfectly included in this way. And they would kind of pull in data off the CD-ROM as he ran forward through the level. So you're constantly spooling a new data into memory. You're hiding some things from view by curving the level or elevation changes or objects in the way. And all of this stuff helps give the impression of more detail. But it's really just very clever usage of the hardware. And they even have advanced collision detection in there and all of this stuff really kind of elevated it and allowed them to display something. I don't really think any other game in 1996 quite had this kind of rich, detailed, smooth look, all running at 30 frames per

second locked and at a high resolution. No, it was technically a very impressive game. I mean, it was the kind of game that you would see at stores and kiosks just because it looked great. And even when it was side-by-side with Mario 64, obviously Mario 64 was the more conceptually impressive game. But there was a definite appeal to Crash Bandicoot because it was more like, I don't know, Mario 64 was like, hey, I'm living inside a cartoon. Whereas Crash Bandicoot was a bit like, hey, I'm kind of watching a cartoon and sort of manipulating it a little bit. But, you know, that had its own appeal too, because it was, as you say, more expressive. And like, was, Were people really doing streaming, like, you know, data streaming from CD at that point?

Not so much. Yeah. And that's actually one of my favorite anecdotes from the thing that Andy wrote up on this game was how Sony was actually apparently at one point concerned about how often they had to fetch data from the CD. Because they were afraid it would, they would basically go beyond the read-write lifetime of the, or sorry, the read lifetime of the CD-ROM drive in the PlayStation. So, like, you're hitting the lens too often, and it could damage the system. So there was concern over that. And it turned out it wasn't the lens that was the issue. It was that crappy little plastic sprocket that you're the rail that runs along.

It's a mix of things. There's that. The lens had issues, too, but you could adjust it by changing the voltage on it. There's all kinds of issues with the PlayStation CD-ROM assembly is just awful. Thank God for OBEs or ODE. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, in addition to the, the tech element, you know, Sonic's character did, I feel like he was pretty unique in video games at that point. You know, you look at, you look at mascot characters of the 90s. And you have obviously kind of the patron saint, Sonic the Hedgehog, who is really distinct. And he had kind of like a smirking attitude, but he wasn't really obnoxious about. it. There was a cuteness to Sonic that really offset, especially the chubby early Sonic designs. It really

sort of offset the quote unquote attitude. And then you had, you know, dozens of developers who were like, ah, Sonic, we can do that. We'll make a little, a little cartoon asshole. And there, you know, the, the attitude mascots of the 90s were just the worst. They had no appeal to them. They were just vile little horrible homunculey running around. They were so terrible. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Stuart, but you know it's true. Search your feelings.

But Crash wasn't really like that. He was more like, I don't know, he had that kind of groucho Marx thing going on with his eyebrows. And he was, he was less like, I'm a big jerk and I'm going to smugly beat up the bad guy and more like, I am completely off my rocker. I am a weird animal out of my depth, and I am just going to smash into things. It's kind of a Tasmanian devil sort of style. There's a kind of haplessness to him that makes him appealing. He doesn't really know what's going on at any point. It feels like it's little things like we're talking about the expressiveness.

I mean, obviously the first thing that happens in Crash 1 is he runs up to the camera and has some sort of mini breakdown. I don't know what's going on there, but he just screams into the camera. But then when you've got things like the stage, the really infamous stages where he's running away from the rolling boulder, And the whole time you can see his panicked expression. He's like looking back over his shoulder like, oh, Christ, you know. He doesn't want, he's not like a hero.

He's just, he doesn't really want to be there. And I find that quite endearing about him. Yeah, I think, I think people tend to conflate Crash the video game character with Crash the dude in a costume shouting through a megaphone at Nintendo in the commercials. And they're not the same thing. No. I think, I think those, those commercials actually kind of made, crash less appealing because they're like, hey, look, crash is an asshole too. But that wasn't really

the in-game character. The end-game character was much more of like a sort of, as you say, sort of shell-shocked and hapless and just kind of like a little out of his depth. And, uh, yeah, like he's got that kind of manic wiggle to his eyebrows. And it was, it was a very interesting character that kind of stood somewhere between like the, the standard 90s mascot with a toad. something like Mario or Sonic where he's sort of like just this kind of vanilla putting sort of running around with feet. And it's interesting because, you know, a big part of the anecdotes about the game's history are that the executives in Japan saw Crash's design and were like, uh, um, did that sucking in their air through their teeth thing, uh, you know, saying no without

saying no, I think as Jason Rubin put it. Uh, so what they did was they very quickly, stepped out of the conference and called their artist back in California and was like, can you make him cute? And so their artist, I think her name was Stephanie. I can't remember. Anyway, she like threw together some alternate designs in like 15 minutes where Crash loses his toothy grin and his eyes are a little more dewy. And they brought that back into the board meeting and Sony Japan's executives were like, oh, yeah, okay, this will sell here.

Did, um, so, did they get? of him the big eyebrows like they did with Ratchet later? Because that was the difference between I know Japanese Ratchet has these huge caterpillar eyebrows. Right. But I mean, Crash already had big eyebrows, right? Yeah. So I don't think they needed to do that. I think they just needed to take away the mouth and emphasize the eyes. Because that is much more of a cultural divide there. You know, like, if you look at Western emoji versus Japanese emoji, Western emoji are all about the mouth and Japanese emoji are all about the eyes. And that's, that is just kind of like a cultural communication thing. Like, where do you, where do you look when you're, you're looking for, like, the sincerity of someone's expression?

And it's, it's much more about, like, eye-to-eye contact there. So, I mean, I'm speaking in big generalities here, but, but there is some true. truth to it and it worked though it was a big success for them and from what i understand they really tried to pitch this game as a as a japanese sony developed game in japan uh because they kind of felt i guess based on i guess real evidence american games and european games didn't typically perform well there uh and this was an attempt to sort of change it and make it something that felt like it was really from the people that brought you playstation and it definitely did work. I mean, the game sold well in

Japan. Yeah, and you really didn't see a lot of that sort of cultural change, like design change, in characters and games going backward, or going from the U.S. or from the West to Japan. You saw lots of games come from Japan to the West

and, you know, either have their box art turned from anime into like a muscle dude being airbrushed while a naked babe stands behind him timidly. Or, you know, like just comprehensive in-game changes, like, hey, what if we took this journey to the West story of, you know, traveling to China, this popular legend and turned it into a little Native American running around killing Japanese or Chinese, you know, hopping ghosts? That seems good. Or hear me out.

What if Kirby, but angry? Whoa. Now you're on something. Yeah, but you didn't really see like, you know, angry Bubsy the Bobcat turning into Kauai, Bubsy the Bobcat in Japan. So well, they try it a little bit. They actually really, they fully localized Bubsy. The first one? Super Famicom.

Really? Oh, wow. I want to hear that. He recorded all the voice lines that Bubsy makes into Japanese. They localized all the text and the box art is very cute and different. But they didn't, they didn't change his design, did they? Only on the box. Okay.

In game, he looks the same. Yeah. They tried, but, you know. Yeah. And I guess it is, it is, I mentioned earlier, but I do want to point out, you know, obviously Mario 64, um, this, uh, Knights and Bubsy 3D all release in 96. And I think from what it, it seems like, E3 of 96 was the year where everybody that was working on these games went to their wanting to see what Nintendo had secretly been doing on Mario 64 beforehand. And, and I think the, the Crash Bandicoot team came out of it feeling pretty good about Crash. Whereas, uh, from what Michael Berlin has said, they came out of that saying, we're screwed regarding Bubzy 3D. And they were right. They were. They were, but Bubsy 3D was still immortalized by someone who really, really, really, really, really, really, really loves the game.

So there, yeah, so there is, there is definitely like a legacy for Bubsy 3D. So it worked out okay for them, I would say. Not great, but okay. But yeah, you just, you didn't really see a lot of success with the attempts to take Western properties and make them, you know, re-engineer them to appeal to Japanese tastes. And, you know, you have stuff like the Jalico, version of Maniac Mansion, which is just actually bad. It's not good. Oh, yeah. So, you know, the fact is they didn't really change that much about Crash beyond just the character design and some of the branding. Like, fundamentally, the gameplay is still solid. It plays, you know, as well as any of

the really great Japanese platformers of that era. And that was something Japan definitely did way better than the West in those days. Sorry against Stewart. Sorry. This is really, this is me just reigning on Stewart's happiness today, I guess. Oh, that's okay. I mean, for me, that's the strength of Crash is that, I'm not over, I say over Mario 64, I don't mean it literally as in it's better because that would get me

like, you know, strung up, but Crash, for me, it's a game that anyone pretty much can pick up and immediately know what they're doing. It's the four digital, the digital pad directions and the jump and the spin, and literally nothing else. It's just a straightforward platformer that's given any kind of complexity by its

sort of collection, which even, and even that is very straightforward. It's a really basic game compared to Mario 64, which is a game you could pick up and kind of be like, well, where do I go? What do I do? And in Crash, it's just you go forward or you go right, basically. You're completely right. I think that just shows a difference in approach. I mean, with Mario 64, Nintendo was attempting to redefine what the platformer was, and I kind of think they succeeded. Yeah, totally. Whereas Crash was just like, okay, how do we bring the 2D platform genre into 3D? And, you know, this is what they came up with.

And they kind of set, this is where a lot of the ideas that would go forward for that style of game would sort of play out. You know, things like how you handle depth while they have the shadows and the way you jump. You know, we need objects in the way. And that's where they come up with stuff like crates. You can do a lot of fun puzzles with that. And just it kind of pushed forward what you could do with a 2D platformer in 3D. 3D, and the whole genre kind of split during this generation, and that's where you ended up with the 3D collectible style platformers, then you had, you know, 2D-ish platformers sometimes

in 3D like this? It's kind of like, I find Crash 1 in particular very, I think it's probably my favorite one. I don't think it's the best one, realistically, but I love the purity of it. And I love the fact that because it was the first game like this, more or less, it's kind of playing with the form a little bit, the way it makes you backtrack. and stuff like that, it's the kind of thing where you'd think you wouldn't have to turn around and go back down the fork you've just come up with a really weird, restricted, difficult view

because there is a fairly compelling argument that that's actually really crappy and you think you shouldn't have to do it. But with Crash, it's just kind of like, well, we've not made one of these before, so how can we add challenge to this? And it's like, get all the boxes without dying, but to get all those boxes, you're going to have to double back on yourself. You're going to have to do unintuitive things.

You're going to have to utilize the sort of weird geometry at the sides of the levels. You know, it's like the level where you're crossing the bridges up in a void, basically, road to nowhere. All you're doing in that essentially is just jumping. There's nothing to it more than that. It's just precision, difficult jumping. But then if you're aware of how, like I say, the weird kind of collisions and geometry works, you can jump up and you can run on the ropes. And part of me is thinking, that's like, that's an exploit.

That's a glitch. And then I think, is it, is it, though? Or is it like a tech? move? Like, do they know you can do this? I don't know. I just find it kind of interesting how it blurs the lines between like level design that's kind of organic and level design that's kind of like, look, you don't know how this works. We don't really know either. I think it's actually a really important point. That's something that a lot of the best platformers kind of share is this, you want that feeling of going back to a stage to feel like you might find

something new. You know what I mean? You definitely had that in Mario or you go back in. It's like, okay, if I fly up here, there's something here. With crash, you know, there was different, it's not quite as robust, I'd say, but there are reasons to go back to levels. And it kind of feels like you can mess around with the game a little bit and discover new things. And that just sort of itches a part of your brain and it feels very satisfying. Yeah.

And it makes it fun to go back through. And all of it's connected, of course, by that, I guess I could say, Mario-esque overworld map. Yeah. Or it's more like Yoshi's Island, I suppose. Or you're kind of in that spinning 3D island moving between. levels and I think it works. Yeah, I think, you know, with Crash 2 and 3, they really moved more toward the Mario 64 hub style with the warfrooms and everything. But this one is much more just kind of like, here's some stages. But, you know, I think, you know, going back to the Mario 64

comparison, I think there's an element of self-importance to that game where it kind of feels like Nintendo took it upon themselves to say, we're not just making a 3D platformer. We're not just defining the 3D platformer, we're defining how 3D games work. We are walking you gently into the world of 3D games and analog controls and things like that. So I feel like that game did have a lot kind of, you know, a big burden on its shoulders. And so it does, it does have a very different feel. Like you start out the game and it's just kind of like, hey, here you are in an open field with some trees, fart around for a while. Whereas crash is just more like go for it guys you know it's funny you mentioned that where you just dropped into the

world of maria 64 we should be very grateful that it was nintendo that it really attempted this first in the platform genre because that is so that would have been so easy to not quite nail and if that led to too much confusion from players it really could have spoiled the genre before it even got started so they really showed how to do it right right from the beginning and Despite that open complexity, somehow they were able to successfully guide players along. Hello, my name is Jonathan Dunn, and I'm inviting you to listen to Our Three Sense, a weekly podcast where myself and two of my very best gaming chums are counting down our top 100 favorite video games of all time. For all the episodes and information, check out our website, www.com.com.com.

Welcome to Casual Magic, the show where we explore the fun side of Magic the Gathering. I'm your host Shivenputt, and each week we delve into everything from casual format to explorations of creatures and card types to interviews with designers of the game. At Casual Magic, we believe that it just isn't magic without the gathering. Come along and play. Matt, I've got a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right? And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them, but maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea.

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Come on down to superhero stuff you should know. All right. So come on down to super... Wait, why did I say come on down? To superhero stuff you should know. Part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. So, I think we've probably litigated Mario 64 versus Crash Bandicoot enough at this point. We could just talk about the three games for the next, I don't know,

20 minutes or so and, you know, kind of what their appeal is and then wrap by talking about Crash 4, if you would like. Sounds good. So, yeah, so Crash 1, actually, we've talked a lot about it. I think most of the discussion here has been about Crash 1 and kind of its purity of design. One of the things that I think is really interesting about Crash 1, and this carried over into its sequels, is that, you know, it kind of departs from the sort of rubric, the standard thinking of platform action games by having multiple worlds, but not grouping level types

within those worlds, according to like a common theme. So you have like beach levels and village levels and factories and castles and jungles. And it's not like you're moving through three stages of jungle and then you move along to three stages of beach and then you move along to, you know, four stages of castle or ruin or something. It's more like you'll be in this one world and you kind of get a potpourri of different themes and styles, which it's just a small thing, but you really didn't see that a lot in platform games. It was always kind of like, you know, you're in this space. And so everything is going to be iterating on a concept. So you're going to like have a bunch of slippery ice worlds all in a row.

And I think that really works for Crash's benefit because it is much more of a like, you know, you're going from level to level. You can't really choose to go like tackle this level or that level or that level. It's pretty much like tackle the next level or go back to a previous level. And so, you know, if you hit a wall and you find something really frustrating like ice levels because they are really frustrating, you don't have to beat like five ice levels in a row, which, you know, that's very kind. I really appreciate that. That's very thoughtful of them. I think for me the most interesting things about Crash 1 are almost all sort of atmospheric because as much as I love playing it because I do, it's such a simple, easy to pick up and play game.

And there's also for some reason that I would personally argue the hardest one by an absolute mile. Even just to do the initial clear is really difficult. But I love how moody it all is. It's weirdly dark. Like even the jungle levels are kind of oppressive. The going upstream levels are dark and oppressive. Like, then you go into a temple that's barely lit and that's terrifying with platforms. Dude, Seward, this is such a, it's such a great point to raise.

And it's actually the reason why Crash One also reminds me of the first Donkey Kong Country. Yeah. Because I feel that Donkey Kong Country One also had this atmosphere to it that the two sequels did not have. And it's definitely the same thing here. We're just, there's something about it. I really like it. With Crash 2 and 3, as good as they are, they did lean into the more kind of, this is our family franchise thing. you've got more over sort of cartooniness

to a bit more talking. But then in Crash 1, there's a boss fight, Pinstripe, which is just a gangster jumping up on furniture and unloading a tummy gun at you while laughing maniacly, while Crash coweres behind furniture to take cover from the bullets. I just think that's so cool.

I will say, though, I have to comment on this, and maybe you guys don't agree with me, but my one real complaint with the Crash series overall is the music. I know some people love it, but I've always felt that the weakest point of this series is just the soundtrack's not very good, or at least for me, it never really did anything. I just don't enjoy the music, and that's kind of the thing that's prevented this series from becoming like one of my top five favorite kind of, you know, this is not in the upper echelon of my platform rating system, I guess you'd say, even though I still do quite enjoy it, because I feel like music is absolutely critical to, a platform game. And a great soundtrack would have elevated this to another level.

And again, I know some people like it. But for me, it's just this kind of droning, not very exciting kind of music. It's all too happy and upbeat in a way. On YouTube. Yeah, I think when you have, sorry, Stuart, go ahead. I was just going to say, you can listen to the pre, before they were mixed for console. You can listen to the pre-consul versions on YouTube on SoundCloud from the composer. Some of them sound really good before they've been kind of crunched down and compressed.

But, I mean, I quite like the soundtrack, but I would, it's not exactly Sonic. It's not exactly a Mega Man, you know. Or even like Mario, you know, Mario games, they, they didn't have that, like, kind of jazzy feel of Sonic, but they had, like, something to it. Or, like, Donkey Kong Country, again, these very atmospheric tracks that really, like, set the mood. I just don't feel like they quite nailed that. And it's something that actually continued with Naughty Dog up through the Jack and Daxter series for me. It wasn't until they did uncharted that they finally had a soundtrack that topped the way of the warrior white zombie soundtrack. Yeah, I think Crash's own Stablemate Spiro really kind of laid down a great example of how to create music for a sort of 3D platformer like this.

The Stuart Copeland compositions and especially the first Spiro, they're just really good. They're kind of laid back and atmospheric. There's a little bit of that police style. you know, reggae, but it's not overbearing. There's like lots of good percussion. It just kind of gets into a groove and, you know, it's intense when it needs to be, but it's not overbearing. I mean, I'm just saying the track, Sue or later, that's a banger. I can't take that away from it, I'm afraid. All right. So one final thing I want to note about the original crash bandicoot is that you do see an example of a paradigm shift in how platform games work moving into

3D. Because like pretty much all the 3D platformers of this era, your primary offensive attack is no longer the Mario-style headstomp. It is, in fact, if you try to jump on enemies' heads in this game, it's bad news for you. You need to use Crash's spin maneuver, which doesn't put you up into the air. You don't have to judge your relative location to platforms, to enemies. You don't have to watch your shadow. You get a sense of like where Crash is physically compared to other objects in the environment. And, you know, it's not like the spin maneuver hadn't been seen before.

Obviously, Mario had that in Mario World and Sonic had that, you know, from the very start. It has some sort of spinning attack that turns his body into a weapon. But in Crash, that is pretty much what you have as your means of offense. So, as your means of offense, I guess I would say.

It's a clever way of giving you an instant, like 360 degree, I am now a dangerous object kind of thing. Yeah. I think it really solves the depth problem, which, you know, jumping on a thing in 3D. You can do it. You can jump on enemies because there are levels with required enemy bounces, of spiders and things, but it is generally not the sensible approach. If something's coming at you, it's almost always easier to spin it than it is to jump on.

In the second game, they start adding enemies with big spikes on their waists or that are made out of chainsaws that you don't have to jump on. Okay, well, maybe I just really suck at crash, because any time I've tried to play and jump on enemies, I've quickly died. And this is a game with one-hit kills. It's not a... Oh, yeah. A coddling kind of game. And it doesn't help that, you know, in the first game, the physics on jumps.

You have much less sort of granular mid-air control. It's much more about kind of that... Not quite ghosting goblins, but definitely sort of getting in that direction where you have... It's a little stiff, yeah. Yeah, very, very limited control in mid-air. The later games would definitely limber him up a lot and basically say, physics, reality, who cares about that? What's fun? They also added like dual shot controls and like, I guess, crash three at least.

Yes. And that's something that I meant to mention when I was talking about Mario 64 teaching people how to use analog controls. This was before analog control existed for PlayStation, unless you're counting the flight stick, which you really shouldn't for a game like this. I don't think this, I don't think this game would even be supported. So yeah, it is very much about digital controls in a 3D space, which was very limiting. And again, that's why you get to two. Tomb Raider with the sort of like the world as a grid, move precisely, you know, line up your jumps and take exactly this number of steps before leaping, but you can't really do that in a more limber, fast action game like crash. So, you know, it does kind of have to balance the limitations of the interface and the technology with the sort of expectations of the genre. And even though they were working, you know, kind of from zero expectations for the franchise, there are still the rules and the limitations and the standards of the overall format that they had to adhere to. So, you know, there's a big balancing act going on here. And I think the first

crash really did a good job of hitting it pretty effectively right out of the gate. And, you know, it was a big hit for Sony and for an Audi Dog and deservedly so. Yeah, absolutely. So moving on to Crash 2, which has a subtitle that I did not write down, and I don't want to get it wrong. Cortex strikes back. Okay, not Wrath of Cortex. No, that's number four. Wait, no, it's not number four anymore. It's non-canonical number four. Yeah, Crash Bandicoot 2, I think his Cortex strikes back and does he? Yes, he does.

He does indeed. So, you know, it kind of follows the rules of sequels by being like a better version of the first game with more to do, more complex mechanics. I really think with Crash 2, they really started to lean into the Donkey Kong country thing and are like, let's collect a lot of stuff. So instead of just having one thing to collect, now you have two things to collect. And one of them is like sort of a plot McGuffin, and the other is a thing that you're acquiring through sometimes extremely rigorous and difficult means in order to unlock certain secrets and best endings and things like that. The secrets in Crash 2 tickle my, like whatever part of my brain releases endorphins, because I absolutely love them. I think it's such a, it's such a strange and esoteric game to the point that in the remake, the Crash 2, the insane trilogy remake, the loading screen tips are basically outright telling you where to find the gems because you would not figure it out now. I mean, back in the day, this stuff would be in magazines, but it's sort of little things like on the very first level, if you make your way to the end, this is a new thing for Crash 2.

It tells you at the end, like how many boxes you need and how many you've missed. there's like a hologram that says like 39 out of 40 or whatever and once you've done that level once you go through it again at the end it will say like 12 out of zero and it's like that's weird that's almost like a glitch but no the game expects you to figure out from that that you need to go through the level without breaking any boxes and if you do that it will give you the blue gem which is like a crucial 100% progress item and almost all the secrets are some kind of weird thing like that stuff that you wouldn't normally do like there's a stack of nitro crate

which instantly kill you on one level, but they're actually in the shape of a staircase, and they're harmless, and you can climb them. And none of the others are like that. The other ones will kill you immediately, but not these. I kind of feel like none of this stuff would make it through testing these days. It wouldn't happen. And I love that it did.

It makes me so happy that there's stuff like this. The level where you're being chased by a giant polar bear, when it falls through a bridge and you're supposed to just follow it down into this death void, there's no clue for this. it's just you're supposed to know to do that and in the course in the remake obviously if you've played rondo of blood you would know in the remake on the loading screen

it just says like when the polar bear falls in a bridge follow it down because that's the only way to 100% this game this is very much like that 90s like playground discussion you might have with friends about secrets that used to be kind of all the rage back in the day and they really

leaned into it in this game I think yeah I was going to say there's there's kind of a draga thing going on here where it's Like, here's a crazy counterintuitive thing you need to do. And, you know, to the point that in Nightmare of Duraga and the Japanese version, every level has a hint for how to find that level's hidden item, which of course was cut out in the US localization. Oh, I know.

That's right. They took that out. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, getting so esoteric that at some point you just have to kind of throw your hands up and say, you know what? Here's your clue. Yeah. Just the, um, this game for me, Crash 2, it's, uh,

It's such a leap over the first one. And as much as I love the first one, this game just feels so much more complete. To me, it's, the levels are basically just almost all wonderful. The way that the secrets work is better and smarter. The saving, the fact you can actually save without having to find a bonus room or a gem. And also the gems are now not mandatory,

no death runs, basically. You can get them even if you die as long as you break all the boxes. but they've also added in these new things, which are death platforms, I think they're called, where if you reach them in the level without dying, then the platform will be there, but if you have died even once, it will not be there,

which means the only way to get 100% on some levels is to progress to a certain point without dying, but it's never like the very end of the level. It's just always a little challenging, like, the first minute or two or so. But even then, the challenge has been toned down to a much fairer one while still being kind of robust and tricky, especially getting 100%. And I think this is probably the game that's the most,

fun to get 100% in because it's both difficult but fair. Yeah, every single other game is either unfair or adds a criteria I don't enjoy, like getting the time trial relics, which just does nothing for me. So this one for me is just fantastic, I think. It's really interesting how much they learned, because this game was released basically a year after the original Crash Bandicoot. I mean, they made this just a ridiculously short amount of time, but it really shows how much they learned from that first experience and how much they grew since.

then. And there are some elements with the hub and the way collections work where you can see that maybe they drew some inspiration from like Mario 64 and the like, because stuff had, we did see more 3D platforms after that and it only makes sense to sort of build upon this new knowledge that didn't exist when they made the first one. And it all kind of coalesces into something that just feels really tight and polished. And it might be the best of three PlayStation. I don't know. It's arguable. I think it's like, for me, I think. it's the best in terms of actual content, but I still like the first one better because it leans more into my taste for ridiculously precise platforming. I don't know. And the atmosphere

of one I like slightly more as well, even though two is different. Two feels like money. It feels like they threw money at it big time. That's true. Which, you know, it works. It deserves to have money. I do like the night stages, though. Oh, they're really cool. Where they have like the fireflies and everything in there. And it's really cool to see the way they've enhanced and improved. It does feel like it builds upon those original themes in some cool new ways. It looks great. Yeah. So to me, Crash Bandicoot kind of follows the sort of cycle that you saw with Tomb Raider, where the first game was this kind of like plucky, small team, doing something new, different, innovative, really catching people's attention. The second one, they were like,

let's do this again, but let's make it better. Let's refine it. Let's get more ambitious. Let's put more money into it, more resources. And then beyond that, it's kind of like, hey, here's an exercise in diminishing returns. I don't know if that's, if that's fair to Crash Bandicoot Warped the third game, but I just don't ever really hear people talk about that one in the same reverent tones. It's a lot of people's favorite. Yeah, this is a lot of people's favorites, exactly. And this is one of those things like Sonic 3 where I don't ever, I don't ever hear people talk about how the third game is amazing, but actually people love it. Because I remember when Sonic 3 came out on virtual console, I did a review of it. And I was like,

like, man, this really kind of misses the point of what makes Sonic good, huh? And immediately people were like, wow, that was really brave of you to say that. People are going to be so angry. Really? People like this game. I had no idea. So what do I know? When you plug it into Sonic and Knuckles, that's when it becomes a finished game. So when you put this disc on top of the crash disc in your PlayStation. Your PlayStation crashes. Literally. Perfect. It moves up to its billing. So why is this so beloved? Because a lot of people had it. as a kid, I guess. Like, I can't much better than that.

Crash warped for me. They added some really interesting locales. There's a ton more with, like, vehicles and such in this. Like, they've got the jet ski style stages going on all over the place and the motorcycle, which is right on the cover. Yeah. It just feels like they're throwing more ideas at it. And I think it works pretty well overall.

My view of it, personally, is it's a pretty, it's, I mean, I would be a fool to call it a bad game, realistically. Like, it looks incredible. for PS1, I think. It's such a good looking game. The focus on time trials for me brings it down a little bit because it means sort of by design the stages feel more streamlined, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It suits the style, but I'm not that interested in doing time trials because there's nothing I find more frustrating than getting to the end of a level without dying and then being told I did it two seconds too slowly. And when you're locking full extra levels behind that stuff, that kind of bums me out. It makes me not want to play it. But the other problem, my help of this game is basically in Crash Bandicoot 2, for me, the worst levels were the jetpack levels with the bizarre controls. They were okay.

But the good thing about the jetpack levels is you could take them as slowly as you wanted. You could learn how to use the horrible control scheme and figure them out. But then in Crash 3, it puts you in a motorbike with also horrible controls and demands you come in first to progress. Yeah, those stages are a little bit rough. If you make a mistake, you're not coming in first.

They're really difficult for me. So it's kind of the equivalent of those Grand Theft Auto San Andreas plane levels? I suppose so. The R.C. plane? Oh, it's not that bad. I've got to be honest, I'm not familiar with them. I'm not familiar with them.

For me, the motorbike levels, plus the jet ski levels, which are just to me kind of like, they feel nice to control, but they're not very fun. And then there's the biplane levels, which are fine, but all of the time I'm playing those stages, I just find myself thinking, like, I want to jump on a box. What am I doing? Give me a box of a jump on. Yeah, I mean, I actually really do. like the jet ski stages in that.

I think they feel, like you said, they feel good to play. They're a nice variety. It adds some variety to the game. Carving up the water feels fantastic. They did a great engine. It really smooth, really, kind of play. Yeah, they actually have full 3D waves, kind of like wave race. I totally get why people love them.

It's just a personal taste sort of thing. It's just for me, I like the more focused kind of purest kind of platforming. I can definitely get behind that. All right. So I'd say that wraps it up for the original Crash trilogy. Very briefly, let's talk quickly about the spinoffs, the wilderness years, anything that happens to be particularly notable. I guess Crash Team Racing is notable because it was developed by Noddy Dog and was one of the mini, mini, mini, many, many, attempts to take a mascot character into a Mario Kart style racing game. And they succeeded because it's much better. I was going to say this is one of the only examples along with maybe what Sumu Digital did with Sonic that I think were they actually really succeeded.

Yeah. Because Crash Team Racing is great. Yeah, I love it. extremely well. The remake from last year or the year before I forget, the remake is, to me, it's stunning. It's such a good game. It is, yeah. I mean, this really did, like, it had the nuance that you'd expect from a Mario Kart game,

honestly, and it just felt, like, the track design was excellent. And, you know, Mario 64, they use sprites for characters, where this was more like Diddy Kong racing as well, where you have the full 3D characters in there. And that does change the feel of the game, I think. I feel like for me, and I'm not going to turn it into a Mario Kart versus Crash thing, but for me, Mario Kart almost immediately lost its way after the Snows one. I quite like the recent Mario Kart 8, but for me, once it became more about which items you get pulled, I sort of lost interest in it because for me,

crash team racing, you need to be skilled at racing. It doesn't matter what items you pull. In Mario Kart 64, it's kind of like, I suck, but I just got three stars in a row and then a blue shun, and I'm in first now. And that sounds like me just being salty that people keep beating. me. And that is it. I am. I am very salty about people beating me. And that's the reason why I don't like Mario Cards

anymore. It's funny that this almost became a tradition, though. Like, they did three crash games and then crash team racing. And then they did three Jack and Daxter games in PlayStation 2, and then they did Jack X. When are we doing the two-hour Jack X? I was waiting for the uncharted car racer that never

came. Uncarted. Well, there's always hope for Last of Us. So Crash Team Racing, only only the first one was developed by Noddy Dog, right? Because there was also like Nitro Team Racing or something like that. Crash Nitro Kart and Crash Tag Team Racing.

All right. So we don't have to talk about those because, you know, things get farmed out. They get franchised and it's hard to... Speaking of that, though, that's actually where I have to mention this one because it's so weird. So obviously after this point, Crash started to get farmed out, right?

Like, that's where most of these wilderness years games came from. Actually, all of them, really. but the first crash bandicoot game to be developed by a studio other than naughty dog was actually a Tiger Electronics 99x game I guess are you guys familiar with this thing I don't even know about 99x no so it was another one so this is this is all tied in with what they try to do with like the gamecom and it's like another iteration of it where it uses it like an 80 by 80 dot matrix screen uh and it's I mean, these are awful, awful games, like very small, like, just, yeah, basically they made a crash game. They made a crash game. There's commercials out. It cost $30 when it came out. It was basically, like, running up the screen using very simplistic, like, pixel graphics on this thing.

And it's just, you know, you got to think gamecom, but worse, because that's exactly what is. Extraordinary. There was a Resident Evil 99X game, too. Wow. It was. Yes. Terrible idea. This is such a weird time in history

Where Tiger somehow managed to get their hands on all these licenses I mean they almost had Symphony of the Night for the game com We got Sonic Jam on the gamecom There's like Virtue of Fighter kind of games in there I can't I don't think it was virtue of fighters mega mix Yeah Resident Evil 2 Duke was on there I think Duke Nukin was on there

Yeah Duke exactly Duke Nukum's on there Jurassic Park the Lost World like all these big licenses All on this awful awful series of devices devices it's unfathomable that this would happen okay so this was this was a big surprise for me uh mr handheld gaming fanatic uh somehow i had completely never heard of tiger 99x or if i had i don't blame you entered a fugue state and forgot all about it you can i only learned about this stuff when i was covering resident evil two on df retro like two or three years ago when i was like wait a minute what's this thing it's like oh yeah all right so there's basically 20 years of of

Crash games that no one really cares about, but it did culminate just a few months ago in a proper Crash 4, It's About Time, released in October 2020, and developed by Toys for Bob, which is kind of interesting because, oh, go ahead. I do want to say, you know, we don't have time to talk about all the Wilderness Years games, but it is worth noting that the original pseudo-crash Bandicoot 4, of the Rath of Cortex, was developed by Traveler's Tales. And that's kind of important because Traveler's Tales

obviously now known for the Lego games, they had also done Sonic to Hedgehog games. True. So they're this one British developer that had a chance to essentially work with huge franchises from each of the console manufacturers. Like, not all of them,

but they got Sega and Sonic. They got, you know, naughty dog and crash. They just never got Mario. But I'm not sure I'd want to see a Traveler's Tales Mario game. I mean, I don't know, maybe you guys would have liked that over Mario Sunshine? I absolutely would not.

Maybe now that there's Lego Mario sets, maybe they'll do a Lego Mario game. You know, it could happen. Oh, it could have. Yep, anything's possible. The path forward has been set. So Crash 4 It's About Time was developed by Toys for Bob, who most recently had kind of been the leaders, the innovators behind the Skylander series. And Skylanders, of course, integrated a bunch. of universal properties, it's all kind of incestuous.

So I guess that was kind of like a backdoor for the return of Spiro and Crash, although I think Spiro's return was less successful than Crash's. Yeah. Oh, sorry, I thought you, do you mean the remake trilogy that they put out? The Reignited trilogy. I thought that was really good person. I just didn't hear much about it. Whereas Crash Bandicoot, like people really have been all in on both the remakes and

And Crash 4. Well, that's an interesting thing because Crash 4, I think, was kind of the result of the success of the rebooted trilogy. Oh, my God. How about the remakes? That sold so many millions of millions of copies. I was absolutely stunned. It was huge.

They brought it back. They remade the first PlayStation games, which we've just spent a lot of time talking about. And they did an excellent job on it. And I think it was clear that it was successful enough that it was time to create a brand new crash game, which is what Crash 4, it's about time is. So basically, you know, as You know, as Crash Bandicoot fans, are you guys satisfied with It's About Time? I think so.

I actually, you know what? It's, um, they did a nice job because it feels like a game that kind of reined in everything and brought it back to the originals. It feels like a natural successor to the third game, if you will. Uh, it doesn't try to do anything crazy or new necessarily, but it's all very polished and nice looking and it's also the first one. I think, well, no, not the first one, I guess, because, but it runs it, it's a first numbered sequel to run at 60 frames per second, which by it's that, you know, as a result of

this, the game just feels even better to play. So it's this very smooth continuation of the series. It almost feels like it could have existed back in the 2000s, as if this were a proper game on, like, say, PlayStation 2. And I don't mean that in that it looks dated, because it does look great, but it does feel like a game of that era. I personally found bearing in mind that sort of what's the word caviate, caveat, that's the one, thank you there, thank you, Jeremy.

the caveat that I played this on a base PS4 where it does not run at 60 frames per second Oh yeah, that's right It runs at random frames per second I don't know what it is I honestly was I was not pleased with this game at all I was very disappointed by it personally

It's super superficially to me it's fine And maybe when I get the series X Which is coming next week I will play it in 60 frames per second and I'll suddenly be like, oh, this feels great. I found this game was pitched ridiculously difficult to a point that I couldn't enjoy it. And it's not like Crash Bandicoot 1, which is insanely difficult, yes,

but this game, it felt nuts. In the old Crash games, it would be like, you got 39 out of 40 boxes, but you're fairly sure you know where they're boxes, you didn't have the gem you needed, or you missed the death path or whatever. And in this game, it would be like, level one there's a hundred and fifty boxes you missed one of them because we put it behind

something we put it behind a pillar that you can't see you have to just go behind the pillar and do a spin and there's a box there but you would never have known that well they'll be off the screen on top of other boxes which once you've broken them there's no way to get that box anymore and yes you don't have to get a hundred percent I totally get that but I used to like getting 100 percent in the crash games I think that's really that's a really interesting point to raise Stewart because you're right just playing through the levels as is i found them quite enjoyable but i never i never actually had the time to go back and try to do 100% runs it's something that sorry i don't mean no you're right something that bums me out a

little bit about modern platformers in general i just so focused i apologize but um the focus when you finish the level on saying like you missed because in crash four when you finish a level there's about eight criteria you could potentially have missed out i think it's like did you get enough one before did you get all the boxes did you get all the boxes without dying did you die too many times. Did you find the hidden gem that we hit in the level? And I just kind of get like, oh, God, I'm not even close to being done with this stage. And I died about 60 times because the difficulty is pitched so high. I just kind of view that as optional. So I get your point. It is optional. You're totally right. It's just a whole kind of like, I just found the game super difficult with weird

decisions like the boxes that go on fire and then go off fire. I just kind of found myself thinking, like, why are these even in the game? Why are there so many grind rails? I don't know. I wasn't super enthused, I wasn't super enthused by it, but when I play it, the way it's meant to be played at 60 frames per second, maybe I'll change your mind, because honestly, that does go a long way with the feel of a platform game, and it's got an unlocked frame rate to me. Yeah. Especially a game that requires that much precision. It just kind of feels sluggish and unpleasant.

So I'm looking forward to giving it a second go, basically. I kind of get what you mean, and I feel like, so one of the things you kind of have to do with modern games a lot of time is this focus on getting the hour count up because people love to focus on artificial length to the point where I've often discussed that in some ways I think that this is actually damaging games. It's resulting in padding and design decisions just to just to create a game that where they could say, oh, it's like 30 hours, 40, 50, whatever, however many hours long, where platform games like this traditionally, that's not the point.

Like the point is that they should be engaging enough that you want to play them some more. maybe there's a time trial there, maybe there's some other little challenge, but just cramming it full of artificial goals like this is actually a bad decision, I think. And I think the game plays much better if you're able to just ignore that. Yeah. But if you're the type of person that sees that screen at the end and says, oh, man, I got to get all that stuff, then yeah, I can absolutely understand where it would sort of rob you of any joy that you might have otherwise experienced. I feel like a lot of the intrigue of, say, Crash 2 would be you'd go through a level, you'd realize that there was an alternate route from another level

that brought you back into that level. And you'd be like, oh, so that's where those 50-odd boxes that I missed have gone. But it was never like, okay, I've painstakingly gone through this whole long stage. It's taking about 40 minutes to do. But because I didn't jump down this bottomless pit and find the random box that's not on screen that's there, I still have to do it again. That, to me, is kind of like, they've leaned too hard into the challenge for me.

It's the wrong kind of challenge. But then again, that's just me. A lot of people love that stuff. This game has been quite widely acclaimed. And, you know, I'm the guy who thinks Bubsy's pretty good. So what the hell, who cares? You know, who cares what I think. Hey, like I said, Bubzy won.

It's not that bad. It's pretty good game. It's a pretty good game. It's a pretty good game. We're going to, at limited run games, we're going to lock down the Bubsy license and hire you to design to direct the next game for us, Stuart. Yes. Finally.

That's what's going to happen. Finally. Promise. Swear to God. Bubsy time. You hear it first. All right. So I think that's,

probably a full podcast right there. More than an hour and a half. My goodness. So many words. But yeah, we've covered the classic Crash games pretty effectively. Talked a lot about the context and place and history for the series and also discussed the amazing controversy around Crash 4, which is basically just, you know, varied opinions. So guys, thank you very much for joining this episode and bringing the wisdom of experience as opposed to the the knowledge of book learning, which is all I can offer. It's a fully fleshed out podcast. And I thank you for making it happen, even if it was a little later than we intended. Of course. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you. And I'm hoping it's been exactly six

months since our last recording together. I hope we can do it again sometimes sooner in the new year. So I will look for opportunities to get you guys on again. But in the meantime, until then, please let everyone know where we can find you on the internet. John, where can people look you up and enjoy your hard work and interesting information. You will find all of my stuff over at YouTube.com slash digital foundry or over on Eurogamer.net slash digital foundry where we're posting all kinds of stuff. And hopefully next year I'll get to get back to some retro coverage again. Because right now we're all doing all this modern stuff, you know.

Yeah, freaking console launches. All these new consoles. It's like, come on now. The only new console I want is the analog NT Mini, damn it. yeah exactly all right and where can we find you on social media unless you would rather not say

uh well you could find me at dark one X on Twitter and I if you follow me I will add you in yes please be nice to John not enough people are nice to him on social media and it's really stupid because John's great does great work he's a nice guy so please

behave yourself when interacting with him you've had your share of this I think in the past nothing compared to what you deal with honestly. I've never fully embraced like a line of coverage that

throws the console war hyperbole into full contrast. You are a brave man. You have thrown yourselves into the meat grinder. And yeah, I just, I can't imagine. But the work you do is great. And you always bring a lot of insight

into, you know, explaining how tech makes great games. So thanks for all that you do on that front. And Stuart, where can we find you? Yeah, I've got to say, thanks, John. I've seen some of that stuff, and it's just awful. I can't even begin to conceive of how people get that angry about video games. They sure love them. They love their little boxes. But, you know, I mean, what if the frame drops one time? What if the frame drops? What then?

No. Yes, okay. You can find me at Stupacabra on Twitter, or you can read stuff I post on Retronauts as often as I possibly can. I have a couple of other podcasts. I'm going to very briefly plug. One of them is called Ars-Holvania, and it's about me and Andy Hamilton coming up with the worst possible imaginable take on a video game or video game-related subject, then tweeting it and seeing how much we can upset people, which you could argue is making the world slightly worse, and I apologize for that, but it's only for comedy. I've got to listen to this. It's only for comedy purposes, I promise. The other podcast is called Animani Chat, as in Animaniacs. I have basically copied Bob and Henry in doing Talking Simpsons.

Sorry, Bob and Henry. But we're doing Animaniacs. And the secret twist is I hate the Animaniacs, and I hate watching it. So it's me and my co-podcaster Luke Fletcher, who loves the Animaniacs, and we've created a sort of a, I don't know what you'd call it like a sort of dichotomy there, where I am. Adversarial vibe? Yeah, yeah. But it's a bit like the worst idea of all-time podcast, except localized specifically to my hatred

of one cartoon, basically. So, yeah, check that out. If you are a fan of Animaniacs and want to hear. something that will possibly upset you or would like to take delight in my suffering, then by all means, tune in. All right. And finally, Retronauts you can find at Retronauts.com

on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And on iTunes, you can also support Retronauts and help make this podcast continue to happen by going to patreon.com slash retronauts and supporting the show for three bucks a month. You get access to each episode a week in advance without any advertisements and at a higher bit rate quality than on the

public feed. And if you support us for $5 a month, you also get exclusive episodes every other Friday as well as weakened columns once a week by Diamond Fight. So a lot of bonus content for half the price of a Starbucks latte. I don't know why that has become the standard metric for game pricing or object pricing, any kind of pricing. But it's 200 gumballs. Come on. So yes, check us out there. And as for myself, you could find me, of course, doing retronaut stuff. You can find me doing all kinds of stuff at Limited Run games, both the newsletter, their website, their videos, and even stuff inside of games. I'm putting together right now, should be done by the time this episode comes out, a massive, like, 160, 180 page book compiling. the history of the Monkey Island series in the words of its creators, and it's going to be phenomenal.

I've been working with really great people on that. So lots of game histories type stuff, even though I'm working with a games publisher. It's never going away. And there's also my YouTube channel, Look for Jeremy Parrish. Every week, talk about Nintendo games, NES games, Game Boy games. I'm also launching in 2021, a comprehensive coverage, like retrospective series on the Sega SG 1000. And that will get every single game. game by God. So you can look forward to that because what is life unless we're taking on too many stupid projects?

Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks again, John and Stewart. Thank you. And we will be back in a week with another episode and probably in like three or four days with a Friday episode. I don't know. Check it out. Retronauts.

It's a thing we do. That's the end. I'm going to be able to be. You know,