- Memory was so short in Crash Bandicoot
that I took to stealing little bits
and pieces of extra memory
from the Sony libraries.
I would like just try
erasing parts of them
that I thought I wasn't using
and see if things still worked.
If they did, I would
mark them as available
and I just hacked their code by just
changing the byte codes.
I'm like, you can do this.
Look, I fixed it.
If they wouldn't fix it for me,
I was just gonna like edit their code.
It was free memory. [laughing]
The memory was finite.
But you were definitely
not supposed to do that.
Hi, I'm Andy Gavin,
co-founder of Naughty Dog Inc
and lead programmer on Crash Bandicoot.
We set out to make the first 3D
character platform action game,
to do it right, and
literally hack the hardware.
[upbeat music]
It was part of the Naughty Dog philosophy
to leave no stone unturned,
no cycle of CPU or GPU or byte of memory
that you could use unused.
So if it existed there in the machine
whether we were supposed to use it or not,
whether you had to use some crazy trick
to use it or not, we would figure out
how to like make the most of it.
In the summer of 1994, my
partner Jason Rubin and I
were wrapping up Way of the Warrior,
which was our 3DO fighting game
and we were trying to figure out
what kind of game do we wanna make next.
The biggest genre on consoles at the time
were platform action games,
games like Super Mario World
and all sorts of other
classic 16 bit platform games.
And at the same time in the arcades,
there was a new 3D hardware
and certain genres were
making the transition
from their traditional 2D state to 3D.
For example like Street Fighter II
and Mortal Kombat were still all the rage,
but now there was Virtua Fighter.
That was using 3D graphics
and they were just cool
and it was clear that
things were going that way.
New consoles that are coming out,
they're gonna be 3D.
Can we make a 3D platform game?
No one had ever done it, but like,
but it's got to happen.
Think about that world
or like speeding through
a Sonic the Hedgehog doing
those loop tubes in 3D.
What is that gonna look like?
Prior to fall of 1994,
Naughty Dog was just Jason and Andy
and it was the synergy
between Jason and I.
We both did all the creative stuff,
we were best of friends,
we were roommates,
and Jason was a phenomenal artist
and I was a game programmer,
I think a pretty good one. [laughing]
Between the two of us,
like he would try to
make it look incredible,
I would try to make the
technology really work
and we both tried to make it really fun.
Jason and I had sold the
distribution publishing rights
for Way of the Warrior
to Universal Studios
to a new unit called
Universal Interactive.
They're basically like,
come out to California,
move out to Universal's lot
next to Steven Spielberg
and we'll give you like
a bungalow for free
and utilities for free and you can just
do whatever you want
and all you have to do
is show it to us.
Got the dog, the Naughty Dog Morgan
and ourselves into my Honda Accord
and we drove across the country,
so we had lots of time to talk.
So we're like, well what
would it be really like
to do a platformer in 3D?
We're talking about
like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Imagine you're going through loops,
you're running and
you're jumping platforms
and collecting stuff in 3D.
The camera's always behind you.
You see the world and
that looks all great,
but it's like the Sonic's ass game.
All you do is see Sonic's ass.
But the front of the character is where
the expression is.
Could we do levels where
you come at the camera?
But how are gonna see where you're going?
These eventually led actually to
the boulder levels in Crash Bandicoot.
Should we do levels sideways,
should he look over his
shoulder towards the screen?
We're simultaneously designing the game
that became Crash Bandicoot and sort of
shopping for a platform for it.
We knew because it was gonna be a 3D game
that we wanted to do something
on one of the new 32 bit platforms.
So there's the 3DO which we
had already made a game on,
but the machine was sort
of clunky half 3D machine.
It was also very expensive
and wasn't selling very well.
Then there was the Atari Jaguar.
We just sort of took
it as a bit of a joke.
And then you had the big guys
all about to release new machines.
You had some mystery machine from Nintendo
but we had no way of knowing
what Nintendo was up to.
They just basically
didn't talk to Americans.
Sega had two things going on.
They had a 32X which
was coming out that fall
which was some kind of like way in which
you souped up the Genesis.
Then they were making this new machine
that I don't remember if it
was called the Saturn yet or,
but it became the Saturn.
And then there was this wildcard Sony.
They hadn't done video games before.
We heard they had this
powerful new machine,
so we contacted both Sega and Sony
and got the information on the machines
which they gave us.
You have to sign your life
away and your firstborn
and all that and then you
can order the machines
if you gave them the deposit and stuff.
And then Sony had this new machine
which was like all 3D.
It could do 2D pretty well too
and it was like a new clean
design very similar to
high end commercial 3D hardware
like the Silicon Graphics hardware
but with a bunch of simplifications
to make it much more economic
and there were two main custom
chips in the PlayStation 1,
a graphics unit and a
sort of custom MIPS CPU.
But the GPUs today are
wildly more complicated
and they also do a lot of the math work
that old GPUs in the 90s did not do.
PlayStation 1 GPU just drew
triangles on the screen
but it was pretty good at it.
It could draw about
120,000 polygons a second
of triangles which was phenomenal.
If you were using a PC at the time,
they had no 3D graphics hardware.
They had like VGA boards.
You'd be lucky to get a
couple hundred polygons
because you had to do
them all in the software.
But here was the PlayStation
which was gonna be like
199, 299, whatever it was.
- 299.
- And it was like a complete machine
with a CD drive and with
the memory and everything.
Console machines like
compared to PCs at the time,
a world of difference.
We're talking Windows 3.1 and DOS.
To run a game, you usually
had to have a boot disk
with like custom AutoExec
bash and config.sys
and you had to open up your machine.
This was not a very game
friendly world on PCs.
But PlayStation or Genesis
or a Super Nintendo,
you just shoved in the
cartridge or the CD,
pushed on, boom, it booted.
I liked the Sony best.
It was neat and clean and powerful
and intended for 3D.
I really thought it was the only
one of those machines that'd actually do
what we were sort of aiming at.
The core idea behind
Crash Bandicoot as a game,
it was gonna have a mechanic like a game
like Donkey Kong Country.
You were gonna go through levels with
successive timing challenges
and enemies and jumps.
It was gonna be platforming
and it was gonna have
a cartoony animal character
and we wanted to not make it look like
a video game exactly.
We wanted it to look like
a Looney Tunes cartoon
where the character was
highly animated, fluid.
If he got mushed by a giant stone roller,
he got turned into a flat
thing that waddled around.
We wanted a world that
looked like a cartoon world
with the kind of sensibility
that was classic cartoons
or sort of, it was being
reinvented at the time
with TV shows like Duck
Tales, Simpsons was big.
Animation was cool again.
And Crash won in a frame,
they wrote 30 frames a second
and we got about 1,500
polygons on the screen.
600 of them went to Crash.
That's how important he was to us.
Like most people, they'd use like 80
and so their characters would look like
weird walking blocks.
We wanted him to look like
a real cartoon character.
That required a lot of detail,
so he gets a third of the entire budget.
With Crash, we were forging
into new ground everywhere.
Like no one had ever made
a 3D platform action game.
While it was completely obvious
that PCs, which were the standard thing
that people would use
for development machines
were just not gonna cut it.
Again, it's Windows 3.1 and no 3D graphics
and the things had like
effectively 640k of RAM.
We made the plunge to buy
for everyone in the company
which was about five people at this stage,
Silicon Graphics workstations,
mostly Indigo2 Extremes.
These are like 75 to
$100,000 workstations.
They had 3D graphics.
The software to do the 3D graphics
was also like about $75,000 per machine.
This was what people had done in recent,
very recent memory at the time,
Terminator 2 or The Abyss
or even Jurassic Park.
And so we settled on using as our software
Alias PowerAnimator,
which is one of the three
choices [laughing] at the time.
So we got this clunky big box
which was the early PlayStation prototype
and it turned out to be
a pretty good machine.
But first you got to like understand it.
It comes with a bunch of manuals
which are incredibly badly
translated from the Japanese
and are mysterious and you'd have
amusing debates between the programmers
what they actually meant by
the funny choice of English words.
The way to really figure out what to do
is to test things empirically.
You do that by taking
the individual pieces
and you write test code
to do certain things
on the machine and put
it through its paces,
so like taking a car out on a track
and seeing how fast it
can actually corner.
There's a bunch of
different graphics modes
and so it's like half speed
in the high resolution mode
but in the mid resolution mode,
which was clearly just
sort of an afterthought,
it's the same speed as
the low resolution mode.
Jason already made this
Crash Bandicoot character
who looks pretty much the same
as the final Crash Bandicoot character
and so I had that drawn on the screen
and we shrank it down to about the size
it would be on the screen.
I ran some code to actually calculate
the number of pixels
that each of his polygons
occupied on the screen and it turned out
they were like, the average
was like 1.2 pixels.
So I'm like, well why would
we texture these polygons?
We decided for characters,
let's not use the texture mode.
Let's just use the faster,
easier to use shaded mode
which most people didn't do.
Most people just used textures.
And part of this is
because we ran the tests
and found that the non textured
mode ran twice as fast.
If you didn't run the test
and just sort of like used
the numbers in the book,
just gave you one number.
So we figured out that
PlayStation could actually
draw a pretty decent number
of polygons per seconds
from the graphics hardware,
but you have to do the math to figure out
where those polygons are gonna be.
These days like almost every computer
and even your phone have advanced GPUs
and they have Vertex units
and they do tremendous
numbers, gigaflops often
of multiple adds.
In those days, most computers just did
multiplies and adds one
at a time on the CPU
and they could do like
hundreds or thousands,
not billions.
This was a serious problem.
[upbeat music]
There was this fundamental problem
in the PlayStation sort of
hardware software interaction
where its math side was
just not up to snuff.
But we kind of knew that
this was a software issue,
that Sony just wanted us
to use these libraries
that they had written
but they weren't really
like using the machine to its fullest.
Somewhere in here, the designers had put
hardware that was designed
to do multiply adds
because you need to do millions of them
but this was all hidden behind a bunch of
C programming language libraries
that Sony had which you
gave them the numbers
and it multiply added them
and those things performed terribly.
While the graphics unit could get 100,
120,000, somewhere in that
range polygons per second drawn,
the libraries could only transform
the math for them for
maybe like 5,000, 10,000,
which was just not going to cut it.
So the base tested
performance on Vertex math
on the PlayStation 1 using the official
Sony way of doing it, calling
their graphics libraries,
was like at least an
order of magnitude off,
like 1/10th of what it should be.
Just didn't run fast enough.
[upbeat music]
We kind of did what any
sort of good scientist does
and you just sort of take it apart
and got enough of that figured out
that I knew that there was like actually
some real horsepower in there
but they were kind of like hiding it away.
With that particular
problem through a series
of campaigns through some
of the guys I knew at Sony,
the creative solution on both the sides
turned out to be, here's how it works,
two pieces of paper slid across the desk.
You didn't hear it from me. [laughing]
But that was actually enough.
We just sort of
systematically worked through
what was on there and it turned out
that there was this little
sort of math side brain,
it's called a co processor,
inside Sony's custom
CPU which actually could
do this very specific and limited math
that was needed to do
the Vertex transformation
and could actually do
it just about the speed
that the GPU could consume it.
In pretty much every
dedicated gaming hardware
since the beginning of arcade games,
there's always been two pretty much
always there main brains.
You've got the graphics
unit and you got the CPU.
CPUs, like pretty good old CPUS
move individual numbers
and that allows them
to do anything that computers can do
but it's like they have
one thought at a time.
The graphics unit because
graphics is a more
game specific area, it
was some way in which
it renders its graphics in hardware.
Early 80s games, even
something like Galaga
or whatever where like the aliens
are sweeping down, those
are what are called sprites.
The CPUs at the time
could not draw sprites.
These little graphics units were designed
to do sprites and scrolling backgrounds.
Basically all of computer
graphics technology
has been driven by the video game.
But you always had this
balance in these machines
between their sort of graphics brain
and their sort of general math brain.
Graphics units nowadays can
do in parallel sometimes
thousands of these same operations
and that's why the actual
sort of processing power
on a GPU is way more than a CPU.
Like they have many gigaflops,
teraflops on some of them.
They don't do as general stuff.
[intense music]
Let me step back and explain
gameplay in the 2D platformer.
Let's take Donkey Kong Country.
You can move forward and
backward in the level,
so to the left and right
and you can jump up and down
or jump up on a platform,
but essentially it's kind of linear.
Usually go to the right
and obstacles come to you.
This goes all the way back
to like Pitfall in 1980.
You might swing on a vine
to swing over a bunch of spiky things.
Monsters may be crawling on the platforms
or bees flying above.
It's a linear progression.
You can see where you're going
and it's sort of very fast paced.
It's like jump jump
strike, jump jump strike.
So it's all kind of nicely lined up in 2D.
The designer measures
out this almost rhythmic
musical progression of the game
and this is one of the things that makes
these games really addictive and fun.
Your progress in getting
better at the game
is to first learn the controls,
get good at being Donkey Kong
and then to learn the specific
movements of the enemies
and the objects in the level
and sort of memorize a route.
It's almost like playing
back like in a rhythm game.
But in 3D, everything's different.
You've added an extra dimension.
You've now got this side to side too.
If you got in Donkey Kong
Country, Mario, whatever,
if three turtles are coming at you,
you have to jump over
or kill or knock away
each of the turtles in succession.
In 3D, you can just go to the right and
avoid them entirely.
You've added a whole extra
dimension to the space
and so there's too much empty space.
This had the effect of sort of diluting
the ratio between choice and conflict.
We had to figure out how
to compensate for this
in order to maintain
the intense action pace.
[upbeat music]
We had this realization that basically
we had added a dimension
so the simplest strategy
was take out a dimension,
but take out different
dimensions in some way.
An example of that was say
like the boulder level.
The dimension we're actually
taking out there is time.
It's not one of the
three spacial dimensions.
Because of the hairy nature of it,
that the boulder's gonna smoosh you
if you don't move like now now now,
you don't have the luxury to pick around
those other dimensions, so it drives you
through the otherwise
sparser thing so fast
that it feels just as intense.
And the hog level is a reverse of this
but instead of the thing moving at you,
you keep moving at the things.
Like you're on the hog
and you can't control
how fast he goes.
He's a wild hog and you have to navigate
mostly left and right and then we had
the more normal 3D level.
In something like Insanity
Beach, we put walls of jungle up
in order to sort of
narrow that dimension down
not fully, but partially.
And then there's other
things to help narrow it down
like for example the enemies,
say like a crab or skunk in those levels,
they track you laterally.
That doesn't mean we can't
use the new dimension
if we wanted too because you can have
a box on the left, a box on the right,
and then you can make interesting things
where they have to
choose to face this peril
and go over to that box
or if you're in like
something like Hog Wild,
we would deliberately do this.
It might be that the spiky thing
is over on the left with a box
and the clear path is on the right.
So the simple way to survive that obstacle
is to go all the way over to the right
and just ride past the spiky thing.
Then you leave the box unbroken.
To get the box, you have to
like go to the last minute
right in front of the spiky thing
and then slide over so
it gives you this choice
or timing elements like
on some of those 3D
type levels like the
rollers, they go in there
and then you can time together things like
you got these roller ones
and then you have like platform forwards.
You have to jump but then
you can add to the tension
by making the platform drop.
It's like a timed platform.
You get on it and it goes and drops.
And then we had other format levels
where we took away a dimension.
For example, there's a bunch of levels
that are kind of like say
the wall, it's essentially
kind of 2D.
I mean, you can come
out but we've just made
a somewhat 2D level by fixing the camera
looking to the side.
And then there's another type of level
where the camera's up like this
and Crash moves in sort of a grid
but there's not too much
play with the up and down
and instead of being wide open,
you're above something deadly on walkways.
In each of these cases we're like
adding constraints or
removing degrees of freedom
to try to narrow it down
and increase intensity.
Because we have this extra dimension,
the game is more varied
than a traditional 2D one would be
because we're removing
different dimensions
in different levels.
We have like seven, 10
different strategies
for removing dimensionality.
Boxes too actually were
designed to fill in the void.
There's not actually that
many enemies on screen
because we wouldn't support that many
but we filled in the empty spaces
to a large extent with boxes.
And then they can drop down in the stacks
and create puzzles out of and so they had
for what's a simple object, you know,
a few polygons and a few rules,
they're incredibly versatile.
[intense music]
We totally knew we wanted
to do this kind of animation
never really been seen in video games
like the sort of Looney Tunes style,
distorting animation.
It's a very stretchy,
rubbery style of animation
which is done in
traditional cell animation.
That meant that characters
had to really animate.
Traditionally in sort of low polygon
90s era graphics, you
would make your characters
by constructing a very
small number of bones,
upper arm bone, lower arm bone, head bone
and you would stick all the art
that pertained to that character's
upper right leg on the
upper right leg bone.
And the bone was like a rigid thing.
It was like a joint.
It could be rotated or moved.
You could kind of go
like [imitating robot]
and if you want fingers,
you had to have like lots of bones.
That was just too much math
for the PlayStation to handle.
We just knew it could
never handle tons of bones.
And you certainly
couldn't do something like
say he gets his hand hit
by hammer in a cartoon.
Well what happens?
It swells up like a balloon or it gets
flattened into a pancake
and something like that.
We just couldn't do that at all
with the whole bone system.
A game like Virtua Fighter in the arcade
used the classic bone system.
This worked okay for a fighting game
because there's not a
lot of ton of deformation
but the characters were a little stiff.
With bones, it's almost impossible
or very different to
do facial animation too
and we knew we really
wanted facial animation.
What kind of cartoon character
doesn't like smirk or wink?
Is it even possible to
get that kind of animation
like on a Silicon Graphics workstation?
Jason made this Crash
model and he set about
trying to do cool and
wacky animations with him
and he found with some work,
you could get the
PowerAnimator to actually do it
because it had these
sophisticated like bone
and vertice waiting tools
and these distortion fields
and like the way that
PowerAnimator did those things
was just not possible on the PlayStation.
These are all things
that used the expensive
floating point hardware that was on the
Silicon Graphics workstation
and it couldn't even
do them in real time.
It had to render them.
But a video game is real time.
You have to do everything
in 1/30th of a second.
This was another big problem
because he wanted that
animation really really bad.
[upbeat music]
I'm like, well we can read the positions
of all the vertices.
If you know where the positions
of all the vertices are in every frame,
then it doesn't matter what kind of bones.
The SGI can use 1,000 bones
and it's all the same.
You're just drawing the polygons
and the vertice positions
and it can be done even quite fast.
You don't have to do any bone work
so you don't have to
spend any CPU on bones.
But the problem with that
strategy is then you have
animation where it's 30 frames a second
and Crash is like 500
vertices and maybe like
600 polygons and you got
to store the position
in every frame of
animation for every vertex.
That's a lot of data.
But at the same time, we
also are already committed
down this crazy memory strategy
to thirty fold our data,
so well, we can handle a bit more data
than other people can.
So we would bake down the animation data
using all of Jason's fancy
effects in PowerAnimator.
I did it and it worked
because the PlayStation development unit
had like eight or 32 megs of memory.
So you could have a much bigger thing
than would ever work on the real machine.
So we're working with this for months
and always I'm thinking, we're gonna have
to fit it in there somehow.
It's just so huge.
It's gonna have to get smaller.
But I had this hunch
that there really wasn't
so much data in a mathematical sense,
that we could write a
domain specific compressor
it's called for this.
So what that means is data in a sort of
computer science theory
has a certain complexity.
There's a pattern to it and limits to it
and with like the animation data,
it can tolerate some data loss.
The same theory is why jpeg works
and why jpeg totally changed the internet
and totally changed how images are stored.
For jpeg, you transform the image
into frequency space, a
difficult mathematical transform,
and you throw away the
high frequency junk,
flip it back and depending on
how much junk you threw away,
it looks better or worse,
but it's still like the most important
parts of the image and it got like
1/20th or 30th the size
because you took out
the unimportant stuff.
I was pretty convinced
that this animation data
was like that, that you could take out
the high frequency animation,
you know, like vertices waist,
it wouldn't move up and down that much.
Mark wrote this program where he analyzed,
he took a bunch of the animations
and analyzed every component
and every vertex and calculated
the kind of dynamic range
or the amount of change
that occurred across animations
and found that indeed
the information change
was quite low, like they
just didn't do much.
So it turned out we could use
this very specialized thing
where it would analyze
a particular animation
and then it would figure out the range
and all these things and it would have
a map at the beginning that said like
vertex seven Y low information,
so it only needs two bits
and it moves over this range
and this one needs this many bits.
The end was something
like 50 or 81 compression,
like the data got like a 50th the size.
[upbeat music]
In looking at the original
PlayStation 1 design,
while it was well designed and balanced,
the machine had two megabytes or RAM
and one megabyte of VRAM.
But it also had the CD drive
which was 640 megabytes
of read only storage
and that's a lot more.
The ratio is very big.
So I had the theory it would be possible
to make levels much
bigger than two megabytes.
Like in a normal game,
you have a game like
Twisted Metal or something,
you would go to the Eiffel Tower level
and it would load the Eiffel Tower level
into say one megabyte.
So they would have a certain
amount of art in them
and animation which is
about one megabyte's worth.
Now you could do various things
to try to squeeze that down,
but there's no way getting
around this basic thing
and people didn't really try.
Here's how it basically works.
The computer, the CPU and the GPU
could only really access stuff
that's in the memory right now.
Every 1/30th of a second
in a video is a right now
to render my frame.
Anything that you're actually
going to draw right now,
any animation you're
gonna be using right now,
any sound you're gonna
be playing right now
has to be in memory 'cause you can get to
the memory quickly.
The CD takes about 1/3 of a second
to move its head to any
specific spot on the CD.
It takes some time to
actually load the data.
It could load a megabyte in
maybe six seconds or something.
So you can't just go draw one frame
and go get a new different
megabyte off the disk
because it's gonna take you eight seconds
to get that different
megabyte off the disk.
Well, what are you gonna do,
sit there do nothing for eight seconds?
You can do that between levels.
So when the level switches,
that's why a typical game
would go to a loading screen
and they'd load that whole megabyte
or whatever off the disk.
The CD, it's just a further storage.
It's bigger but it's slower.
It's further away from
being able to use it,
but why can't you use it? It's there.
On an early PlayStation game,
they have like on megabyte levels
or two megabyte levels and the CD is 640,
that means that could
fit 300 levels on the CD.
Did they have 300 levels?
No, that would take them like
10 years to make the game.
So the CD's just mostly empty
or they fill it all with music
because music is kind of
fat or video or something,
but a lot of times, it's just empty.
Games like Twisted Metal might
only be 50 megs on the disk.
And so every games'
levels are gonna look like
roughly a megabyte, maybe a
megabyte and a half of data.
Now that was sufficient.
Many many PlayStation games were made,
but it was part of my theory
that that didn't have to be so.
[gentle music]
My idea was that I would use advanced
virtual memory techniques
to swap chunks of data
in and out from the,
like basically if the level was
let's call it 30 megabytes,
well maybe you only need at any
one moment in time one megabyte
but the level's actually 30 megabytes.
I would chunk the entire level
into 64k pages and then
there were chunks of data.
They could be something,
anything from a Crash animation
to the Crash code, a piece of background.
Chunks had to be less than 64k,
like pile them in 'till
the page was almost full
but they couldn't go across pages
or you'd have to break the chunks
into smaller chunks.
Then the level consisted
of 30 megs of pages,
16, 18 pages that could fit in memory.
The problem is can I range
the chunks in the level
such that at any one point in the level,
I never need more than
16 pages worth of data
and you can actually take the same chunk,
duplicate it into multiple pages
if that makes the whole
puzzle work out better.
The game is constantly,
it's figure this out in advance,
but it's constantly
figuring out which pages
it's gonna load in if
you're going this way
and which page it's gonna load
in if you're going that way
and it throws away old
pages that it doesn't need
and loads new ones into their place.
Any page can replace any other page
as long as you never need more
than 16 active ones at once.
Crash textures are all pretty sharp
with a lot of color and detail
and Tomb Raider's are like
all washed out and pixely
and whatever 'cause they
only have so much memory.
They don't have any place to put
all the extra texture.
We had 20, 30 times the
amount of space for it.
Or the number of polygons in the level.
Something like Tomb Raider,
it's pretty blocky, like
square corridors and whatever
and Crash has like weird
shapes and whatever
'cause we have many more polygons.
There were a bunch of
different technologies
that serve this but the
memory was a huge one.
So this was one of my sort of like,
patched out a whole bunch
of patents on this actually.
I was definitely one of the first people
to see that you could
really use that storage
on the CD or the disk drive,
it didn't really matter,
as a dynamic part of your game
to sort of expand it.
That's done all the time now.
- Fear not Plumber Boy,
the Bandicoot will come.
I'm coming to get you, pal.
- I think one of the core
legacies of Crash Bandicoot
is that games can have their own distinct
stylistic personality and art style,
and yes, to some extent many did before.
I mean, Mario has its
own sort of Mario style
but it's very much an old
timey video game style.
But Crash had its own consistent world
which draws obviously from
American cartoon style.
And so but the entire Crash product,
by that I mean our first four games,
are consistent within that style.
The originals still play quite well
and they still look pretty good
even like on a PlayStation
1 because the style
sort of transcends the
specifics of the pixels.
Early on in making it,
we had this totally arrogant half hope,
half idea and it was another major factor
in choosing the PlayStation was that
Nintendo has Mario and Sega has Sonic.
Sony doesn't seem to have a mascot
so if we make a mascot style
game on the Sony machine,
we might not have the same competition.
And then there was this
fairly immediate buzz
where they're like, we
have to have this game.
Like, we have to make sure
it's only on the PlayStation.
Like we deliberately set
up to be in the position
to maybe do it and then
we sort of instigated it.
But that it worked out was
like kind of miraculous.
But our dream was to become the mascot.
Now Sony never even even
when they bought it,
they never like official, they're like,
oh it's not a mascot,
we don't have a mascot
like and whatever but
like everyone assumed
it was a mascot and they got so behind it
that they just bought the
rights from Universal.
- Hey Plumber Boy, Mustache Man,
your worst nightmare has arrived.
- Crash Bandicoot started off selling well
but it just kept on going
and going and going.
Crash Bandicoot the first one sold better
in its second year,
maybe in its third year,
and I'm pretty sure
that when we shipped CTR
in the Christmas week of CTR,
Crash Bandicoot won, sold
more copies in that week
than it had ever sold previously.
First of all, it was a
really broad appeal game,
like everyone could kind of play it
whether you were a young kid
or you were a hardcore gamer.
It wasn't highly violent
but the characters were appealing,
it was funny and the gameplay was like
pretty intense and approachable.
You could just sit down and play it
and this was one of the things
that we really wanted for it.
I wanted a game that you didn't have to
think too hard about.
Crash Bandicoot was really the crucible
in which the Naughty Dog
philosophy was forged,
that every element that goes into the game
needs to be great
because we wanted to make
a truly great game, a game
that was gonna be a hit,
a classic, and in order to do that,
we came to believe that
everything in it had to be great
and you needed the best
technology possible to make
all that happen.
The better your technology,
the better the game could feel,
the better it could look.
If you got enough of
these things all right,
you could sort of transcend mediocrity
to become like a gaming masterpiece.
[upbeat music]
