11/14/2022 0 Comments Crash team racing ps1 designer![]() “There was a little concern among a minority,” Gavin says about the reception of the bold move to follow up three critically and commercially acclaimed platformers with a racing game. Crash Team Racing was a match made in heaven for all parties involved, and the folks at Naughty Dog treated it as such. For their part, Crash’s caretakers at Naughty Dog needed a change of pace. Crash Bandicoot was the obvious choice to fill that role, and headlining a racing game could confirm his crossover appeal. ![]() Sony, now an established competitor of Nintendo, needed a symbol for PlayStation to rival Mario, the cutest mascot around. “We had come to the end of good ideas for Crash platformers," Rubin says. The truth is that the decision wasn’t difficult at all, and pretty much everyone involved in the project-from Naughty Dog employees, through the studio leadership, to the folks at Sony-was chomping at the bit to try something new. | Naughty Dogīut before anyone had to roll up their sleeves, Naughty Dog had to make what might have seemed like a difficult decision to move on from its bread and butter platformer games, and try its luck in a genre dominated by Nintendo. The bulk of Rafei’s time on the game was spent on repurposing the environments and characters from the previous Crash games and coming up with the design for the new baddie Nitrous Oxide, but as he himself puts it: “We were a small enough team that we didn't have quite the specialization that we have today on big triple-A games, so everybody would basically roll up their sleeves and contribute.” Crash Bandicoot and the racing girls, as seen on Naughty Dog's homepage in 1999. “The studio culture was shifting quite a bit because we were going from working for Universal to becoming an independent team, and then eventually becoming a first party Sony studio.” While that transition took a couple of years, it pivoted around the period in which Crash Team Racing was being developed. “It was the first product that I directed without his help,” he says.įor Bob Rafei, working on Crash Team Racing was also a significant time for his career. The game marks an important footnote in Jason Rubin’s career as well. Out of these three outstanding games, CTR stands out as the only game released during his tenure at Naughty Dog on which he was not lead programmer. He jumped into Crash Team Racing straight from the all-consuming development of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, and immediately went on to lead the team on Jak & Daxter after. The late 90s were a busy time in his career. “For me, Crash Team Racing was an unusual game in that I was a producer and overall tech supervisor,” says Andy Gavin. This is their recollection of how Crash Team Racing came to be almost 20 years ago. Gavin is a novelist, Rubin works on VR games for Oculus, and Rafei runs his own studio Big Red Button Entertainment. All three have since parted ways with Naughty Dog and established themselves elsewhere. Our guides through the development of Crash Team Racing are Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the duo of Naughty Dog’s co-founders and CEOs at the time Crash Team Racing was made, and Bob Rafei, the game’s lead artist. The start of the trailer for the upcoming remake Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled gives us a quick glance at the past. ![]() ![]() Today, almost 20 years later, Crash Team Racing’s legacy might not be immediately transparent, but it runs through everything Naughty Dog has done since, and it will continue popping up in everything it does next. Against all rules of nature, a bandicoot became a guinea pig and the great experiment began. Fresh off the back of a successful Crash Bandicoot trilogy and in the early stages of talks with Sony about a possible buyout, the studio charted an unexpected course: to try its luck in a brand new genre and test out new ways to run a company at the same time. The year and a half that Crash Team Racing took to develop happened to be the pivotal time in the history of Naughty Dog. Look beyond the surface, though, and you’ll see an extraordinary game that pushed PlayStation beyond its limits, upset Mario Kart’s hegemony, and laid out the blueprint for Naughty Dog’s rise to the top of the video game industry. At a cursory glance, Crash Team Racing is a fun little kart racer expanding on the world of Crash Bandicoot. ![]()
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