Crash Bandicoot (character) - Concept and Creation

Concept and Creation

One of the main reasons Naughty Dog chose to develop Crash Bandicoot (at the time jokingly codenamed "Sonic's Ass Game") for the Sony PlayStation was Sony's lack of an existing mascot character that could compete with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo's Mario. Naughty Dog desired to do what Sega and Warner Bros. did with the hedgehog and the Tasmanian Devil respectively and incorporate an animal that was "cute, real, and no one really knew about". The team purchased a field guide on Tasmanian mammals and selected the wombat, potoroo and bandicoot as options. Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin went with "Willie the Wombat" as a temporary name for the starring character of the game. The name was never meant to be final due both to the name sounding "too dorky" and to the existence of a non-video game property of the same name. The character was effectively a bandicoot by October 1994, but was still referred to as "Willie the Wombat" because a final name had not been formulated yet. Wanting their mascot game to be multi-dimensional in character depth as well as gameplay, Gavin and Rubin chose not to base Willie around one attribute such as "fast" or "cute". The team felt that Willie should be "goofy and fun-loving, and never talk"; the character's muteness was based on the theory that voices for video game characters were always "lame, negative, and distracted from identification with them."

American Exitus artist Charles Zembillas was hired (alongside environmental artist Joe Pearson) and met with weekly to design and develop Willie and the other characters of the game. It was decided early on that there would be no connection between the real animal and Willie's final design. Instead the design of the character was determined "51% by technical and visual necessity and 49% by inspiration". To determine the color of Willie's fur, Gavin created a list of popular characters and their colors, and then made a list of earthly background possibilities (such as forests, deserts, beaches, etc.). Colors that wouldn't look good on the screen were strictly outlawed, such as red, which would "bleed horribly" on older televisions. Orange was selected as the color of Willie's fur as the last available color. Willie's head was made large and neckless to counter the low resolution of the screen and allow Willie's facial expressions to be discernable. Jason Rubin noted the increased difficulty in turning Willie's head with this type of design. Small details such as the gloves, the spots on Willie's back and a light-colored chest were added to help the player determine what side of Willie was visible based on color. Willie was not given a tail or any flappy straps of clothing due to the PlayStation's inability to properly display such pixels without flickering. The length of Willie's pants was shortened to keep his ankles from flickering as they would with longer pants. Andy Gavin owns the original ink sketches of Crash by Charles Zembillas.

Willie's final game model was made from 512 polygons with the only textures being for the spots on his back and his shoelaces. It took Andy Gavin a month to settle on that number of polygons. Because of the game's use of vertex animation, Willie was capable of more facial expressions than other video game characters at or before the time. Willie's jumping, spinning and bonking mechanisms were refined as the Naughty Dog team developed the levels "Heavy Machinery" and "Generator Room". While preparing for the game's demonstration at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the team decided to finally rename the titular character "Crash Bandicoot" (the particular name being credited to Dave Baggett and Taylor Kurosaki), with his surname being based on his canonical species and his first name stemming from the visceral reaction to the character's destruction of boxes ("Dash", "Smash" and "Bash" were other potential names). The marketing director of Universal Interactive Studios insisted that the game and character be named "Wez/Wezzy/Wuzzle the Wombat" or "Ozzie the Otzel". The name Crash Bandicoot prevailed after Naughty Dog threatened to leave the production.

After Naughty Dog presented Crash Bandicoot to Sony's Japanese division, the executives of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan stated their dislike of the character and were unimpressed by the renderings of the character made specifically for the meeting. During a break following the initial meeting, Andy Gavin approached Charlotte Francis, the artist responsible for the renderings, and gave her fifteen minutes to close Crash's huge, smiling mouth to make him seem less aggressive, change his eyes from green to "two small black "Pac-Man" shapes" and make his spike of hair smaller. Sony Japan bought Crash Bandicoot for Japanese distribution after being shown the modified printout.

Crash served as a mascot for Sony Computer Entertainment from his creation until September 2000 when Universal Interactive Studios and Konami entered an agreement that would enable Konami to publish a Crash Bandicoot game (which would later become Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure) for next-generation game systems, with Universal Interactive handling the production of the games; the agreement served to break the Crash Bandicoot franchise's exclusivity to Sony-produced consoles and effectively made Crash Bandicoot a mascot character for Universal rather than Sony. Crash's game model in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was composed of approximately 1,800 polygons, which allowed an increase in detail compared to past models, including a more complex and realistic tuft of hair, a visible uvula, stitching on his jeans and shoes and a designer label on his pants.

Upon beginning development of Crash Nitro Kart, Vicarious Visions chief executive officer and chief creative officer Karthik Bala noted that Crash's physical appearance had been inconsistent since his debut in 1996 and decided to "explore the original vision of the character" in an attempt to bring him back to his roots. Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson were tracked down and enlisted for guidance during development of the game and were faced with the challenge of evolving the character and the franchise visually while retaining their "cartoon-like charm". To redesign Crash and the other mainstay characters of the series for Crash Nitro Kart, the Vicarious Visions team reviewed a number of original development sketches from Zembillas's archives and then redesigned the main characters by incorporating details from the concept art and adding girth to the characters; Crash's appearance in the game, compared to the previous two games, sports a slightly larger nose, fuller eyebrows, and a far more textured body. Zembillas noted that "Crash is slimmer and more appealing now. There's also more emphasis on his eyes, and you can see the craftiness in his personality. That's Crash to me, and he's alive again in Nitro Kart."

Crash is voiced by Brendan O'Brien in Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, Crash Bash, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure and Crash Bandicoot 2: N. Tranced by Billy Pope in Crash Team Racing, by Steven Blum in Crash Nitro Kart and by Jess Harnell in Crash Tag Team Racing, Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind over Mutant. In the Japanese versions of the games, he is voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi up to Crash Nitro Kart and by Makoto Ishii in Crash Boom Bang!.