Crash Team Racing - Development

Development

Naughty Dog began production on Crash Team Racing after the completion of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back; the game engine for Crash Team Racing was created at the same time Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped was produced. During the game's prototypical stage, the team built a replica of the "Crescent Island" course from Diddy Kong Racing to test whether a racetrack of the same scope and scale was possible on the PlayStation. The turbo system that gives the player boosts of speed during power slides and by gathering hang time was added to make Crash Team Racing feel more interactive and involving than older kart-racing games. The characters of the game were designed by Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson, who designed the characters of the last three installments of the series. Nitros Oxide was originally a mad scientist obsessed with speed who plotted to speed up the entire world until the end of time. However, having exhausted human, animal, machine, and various combinations for Crash Bandicoot bosses in the past, it was decided to have Nitros Oxide be an otherworldly character. The original "speed up the world" plot is referenced in a promotional comic (written by Glenn Herdling and drawn by Neal Sternecky) featured in the Winter 2000 issue of Disney Adventures. Crash Team Racing went into the alpha stage of development on August 1999, and the beta stage on September. In an interview with GameTrailers, Naughty Dog's co-president Evan Wells, who was a designer on the game, revealed that Oxide was never intended to be a playable character in the game due to the memory limitations of the PlayStation. The said limitations further affected the game's roster of playable characters; Polar and Pura were originally to ride in the same kart and be played as a single character, but were ultimately split into separate characters, and both Komodo Brothers were to appear in the game before Komodo Moe was omitted.

David Baggett produced the game's soundtrack, with Mark Mothersbaugh and Josh Mancell of Mutato Muzika composing the music. Sound effects were created by Mike Gollum, Ron Horwitz and Kevin Spears of Universal Sound Studios. The voices of Doctor Neo Cortex and Uka Uka were provided by Clancy Brown, while the voices of Doctor N. Gin, Tiny Tiger and Pinstripe Potoroo were provided by voice actor Brendan O'Brien. Additional voices were provided by David A. Pizzuto, Mel Winkler, Michael Ensign, Hynden Walch, Billy Pope, sound effects artist Mike Gollom, Michael Connor and Chip Chinery.