E3 Coliseum: Crash Bandicoot Reunion

hello everyone welcome back to the e3 Coliseum I'm Geoff Keeley and this is something really special you guys remember crash bandicoot I [Applause] remember it very well I was at e3 in 1996 my second e3 and I got to walk up to the PlayStation booth and I played this game Crash Bandicoot and I just instantly fell in love with it and right now this is something that has never happened before I'm not sure it'll happen again but we have a lot of the key people that built Crash Bandicoot with us that game was made by Believe It or Not a team of nine people made that game over two years back in 1996 so let's bring them all out and we'll have the whole team here Andy and Jason the cofounders of Naughty Dog Bob Connie and mark great to have all you guys with us [Applause] so 20 years ago we're gonna turn back the clock and talk about the making of the original crash um you know for me I first met Jason Andy when you guys were working on a 3do game way of the warrior for universal and you know Naughty Dog obviously today many of us play in love Naughty Dog games and you know tribute to you guys that you not only started the company but I think set it up for great success you know over the years now with Evan leaving it leading it but let me ask about you know the two of you guys how'd you know we know that you met you know when you were kids 12 years old you know when we're building games all throughout you know late teen years and your 20s but tell us about you know Naughty Dog coming out to LA and then your interest in this PlayStation platform because I met you guys you're doing a 3do game and then there was this new system coming out PlayStation why did not decide maybe we should make a game for this PlayStation sure well we ended up coming out to California like after where the warrior because we had was published by Universal Studios and they were studying the new games team and offered a space in the lot and we couldn't turn that down so we were driving up to California and had this idea for a new game which was kind of to take platformer action games like Mario or your she's a Highlander Donkey Kong Country and put him into 3d we did not know the specifics but it was sort of shaping out to be the gameplay that that came to be crash and we were at that time we were looking at both the Saturn and this new I think it was even unnamed system that that Sony had and basically it just on paper it just looked a lot better so we kind of contrived to get one it just turned out to be really great crashes here yeah we we had been pretty a seat we had been pretty successful with way of the warrior figuring out fighting games worked here's a system of the 3do that doesn't have a fighting game that was successful so we thought let's do a character action game they're very well loved he wants to learn about aviation too and let's find a system that doesn't have a character action game on it so that was kind of our interest in the PlayStation I remember Marc simultaneously was debating where we should be putting our efforts and came up with the PlayStation as his first choice to and that was probably a different discussion at different decision matrix his mark at the time you were president of universal interactive vice president sir all right so you were at Universal interactive and interfaced with Jason Andy pretty early on there yes that when I when I joined Universal Studios to start off game development it's like great news we signed the way the warrior guys and that way the word was nice and so we you know we met this was before you three we met at in Chicago CES 1994 and then what the heck are we gonna do character action was looking good to me too because I was just coming off of a couple things like Sonic the Hedgehog and PlayStation I don't know there was something special about it that that ken kutaragi dinosaur dam it's pretty amazing so I think we were all heading in the same direction yeah and we were we said look there's not going to be a mascot for this system because they don't have Mario they don't have Sonic will make the mascot and of course we didn't tell Sony that we were out to do that right we just set out to do it and got to alpha without Sony knowing anything we were working on really I mean it was it was fun times it was strange times though because right you're your team you're just getting going you've got like three people when you walk in the door and I think eight the day the game shipped and you know you're mighty publishing organization which was universal interactive Studios had almost exactly the same numbers in it as we're all trying to get in and and break a big product yeah and we outsource design to like Joe Pearson and Charles embolus and we had universals music group do the sound effects my Gollum and you know Josh Mansell for music matata to the music so there was a little more than the eight of us that were integrally working on or nine of us with you mark but it was a tiny team now Connie how does Playstation get involved you have done so much for PlayStation over the years so many incredible PlayStation games Connie has been involved in how did you know they were interesting the playstation platform but then Sony took a keen interest obviously in this game and his team how did that come about there was so much excitement as Sony around this project and I actually was not the first person to get involved as the sign does the producer as the deal went forward um I was a member of the producing team we had a large number people at Sony were interested in the project and people around the world who were cyan't to help guide their Lisa the product globally some of us are still working together today she Yoshida hazhar she was in Japan right in Japan yes and obviously we're still working together today it was a great great team effort I was the day-to-day contact since I was in North America with universal and Naughty Dog I was the person who called auntie at 2:00 in the morning with crash bugs sorry Andy but it was really a team effort ya know and an incredible team let's talk about the creation of the character Bob and the team coming together around that because you guys said you want to do a character action game but you know as I think people know that have read the history it wasn't always Crash Bandicoot right there were many other names and ideas and I know mark you were looking with sorry Russell's the one whistles right was was the one by Lee the wombat Willy the wombat all right we found a book on Tasmanian animals and there was hedgehogs and Tasmanian Tigers and everything else in there Tasmanian devil was in there and we were like this is obviously where character action characters come from they come from Australia and Tasmania so we will take one that isn't taken the wombat because that sounded like a cool word so we started with the wombat we're gonna own that and we're gonna own wallets that was exactly it it was like when you think Tasmanian Devil or you think of the roadrunner you think of the Warner Brothers characters so we're gonna own the wombat that is a great name and we're going to own that and so you know we got Charles and Joe to start doing character sketches with Bob and and part of the way through it we had a character that was named the pinstripe Bandicoot in the game and we were trying to name this character and Wuzzles wombat was the suggestion from somebody at Universal we hated that Willy wombat was the name that we knew by that time wasn't gonna work there was again eventually okay was it taken it was taken yet it didn't do that well so we started to love this word Bandicoot and I think between Dave Baggett and Ann Taylor kurosaki somehow we threw Crash Bandicoot together I think it might have been kif Dave's wife who came up with crash right so just kind of stuck it just it just felt good I think the crash part specifically came from the fact that he was always like crashing and smashing through the boxes so that was one of his sort of fundamental activities yeah and the boxes are a great story we were going to e3 to show the game for the first time and we were I was playing it and it was it was boring because you would kill the turtles and we only could get so many polygons on screen so you might only have so many turtles on screen and then there to be a long distance before the next turtles because you couldn't have too many Turtles close to each other so you were spending a huge amount of time just kind of wandering through these levels to find sparse jumps and sparse creatures so we had to find something to do and we came up with this idea of boxes because they're low poly and put boxes in and our mark came in and said we're going to the show what the hell you adding things last-minute and it it ended up being crashes thing okay so I did it all on a Saturday we snuck in and like added them basically I'm adding in the levels like imagine crash 1 levels and just take all the boxes out where you can see the boxes mark I love the boxes I don't know where this is coming it's be meter tall they were yes they were meter boxes can't recall yes it was a sorry five polygons is that right yes well the thing that you know was so amazing about crash at the time was this idea of you know doing a 3d character action game as you guys said Sonic's ass you were sort of calling it because you were going to sort of look at it from a different perspective at least we came up with that Sonic's axe right there Jason roof in Illinois maybe Nebraska and that was you know a time was a very revolutionary idea but you know this work you know you gotta remember back in 1996 you know Mario 64 we're starting to see that that was more of a you know an open expansive world you still had this kind of you know controlled camera on sort of dollying through a level and that restriction again we had remember back in 1996 as you were saying Jason it's like the number of polygons on screen really you know you had to make choices about what you were going to do and that idea of sort of restricting the camera view in some ways that allowed you I think to push the graphic fidelity of what you were doing in a really interesting way can you talk a bit about sort of you know that it was 3,000 polygons give or take and so on the screen any point you'd only have 3,000 yeah triangles including crash crash was like five hundred some-odd Polly's himself well just why the turtles had to be so low poly but we hadn't seen Mario at all mario 64 didn't get announced until very close to when we were going to e3 to show crash they first got shown next to each other on the show floor so as we were trying to design this game the question is how do you do a 3d character action game we started with the side-scrolling but that's just more of what you used to do why does 3d make it any better when we started thinking about going in and out we realized you would be looking at the characters back the whole time and that's where the Sonics asks the came from because Sonic's backside isn't that attractive which is why crash starts looking at you on the first level so you actually know who you're playing right goes through a couple of moves and then turns around and then from that everything kind of flowed there's another very small nuance that radically changed crash from mario 64 we only had a digital stick we didn't have an analog stick on playstation 1 went so up down left right was the best controls there for our game is in out left right Mario had an analog stick Mario 64 is more free-roaming and so the hardware drove our decisions we also started like on some early level designs with more open levels and we were trying to emulate the sort of fast pace like very rhythmic gameplay of classic 16-bit 2d platformer games where it's like jump jump jump attack jump jump jump attack and in the big field like you could just run around creatures and so we focused it in deliberately honor to both save on the graphics and make it make them higher fidelity and to sort of focus the gameplay so that the challenges came at you head-on so I mean I remember trying to get the title out there get some good press was just brutal we had one interview where the reporter says first question is crash a real 3d game like Mario 64 and there's some you know song and dance but yeah I mean this is all happening in 3d and it adds a lot to the gameplay next question from the reporter since crash is not a real 3d game like Mario and I think it's amazing it's amazing that it became you know the top brand for PlayStation 1 because it was certainly not pill battle it's amazing that there's this level of nostalgia for it 21 years later it just it just blows me away sales did not take off on crash 1 we did well out of the gate but it was an ever expanding kind of user base and the part of the reason for that is we were not well received by the press there were you know the internet wasn't there for people to get independent reviews so it was all game magazines that's where you were getting your reviews and the game magazines attitude was somewhat how dare you take on Mario like how dare you even be saying that you're a mascot character and we got reviews that literally knocked us point because it's not Mario right and by the time we got to crash 2 that it all passed and then it was oh you're the crash Naughty Dog crash Naughty Dog crash and it just kind of had built on itself in that first year of sales and Connie on the PlayStation side I mean you know crash did sort of become a mascot you know the ads I mean I you know started with polygons man but then all of a sudden crash became this this hero character and tell us about that that evolution of this relationship with Universal Nayak for this game because it sounds like you know no one quite knew where it was gonna go well the first time we saw the product it was playable and I'll never forget that lemon when we saw crashed sugar honey go into the screen and it looked beautiful he was adorable but it was a jaw-dropper to me he went into the screen and I think it's him for me it's interesting to remember that we were still trying to prove the PlayStation 1 back then and we had to prove that there was a reason for a console to have 3d capability and for me and for us that was an absolute no-brainer and Jason I remember we were crashed when those reviews came out what I remember most is that some of the press call this derivative which I just couldn't understand because where'd we use now is disruptive we didn't use that then but we thought we were doing something wholly original and I still feel that way very strongly yeah I mean we kind of retrenched as a group because the first reviews of crash were very negative and crash went on to outsell Mario all three of the main titles outsold the Mario titles take that to lumberman Jeff he asked about you asked about the marketing effort and that was kind of dazzling to me I had been with Sony for a while at that point and this was our first big consumer product I had been part of and we have people like Andy house who's ready in our marketing team in North America then Aimee Blair was our product manager I think she's here today amen here I won't put her on the spot um but it was a spectacular team and they were really aggressive and we loved the ads those are actually filmed in our parking lot run yes and the characters just like you can't crash doesn't his megaphone though maybe I don't know and a risk and aggressive I mean for your first ad for this character that's completely unknown to have the character standing in nintendo's what was supposed to be Nintendo's parking lot yelling up hey moustache man I'm Crash Bandicoot I'm here effectively and this is available online if you want to see it that was a big risk and a me and Andy I mean that that knocked it out of the park that ad really changed the way people perceived crash that was huge huge part of its success as was the marketing effort in Japan which changed crash for Japan dance I guess the joke's on me up because up until this point I actually thought that was Nintendo's barking I could be wrong idiot don't believe what you see on TV mark TV trickery uh another thing that you know was really special about crash was the animation system and you know a lot of you guys know mark now and he's stage talking about you know place platforms back in the day mark you wrote a vertex animation system for crash in assembly is that right that's actually just pinched programming because the lead programmer was like hooked up to an IV at the hospital three days before III and I had to jump in and do something for the game I think there was a little coating there but mostly I was I was trying to chip in on the design and layout levels and things well but still I mean to be able to you know go into assembly put this system together but I mean Bob maybe you tell us a bit about that you know the idea of this this animation of the character and you know using you know colored polygons for just textured polygons I mean all this stuff that you know again today developers don't have to think about because there not unlimited but you know lots of resources back that I mean to get that look and feel of the character when you're dealing with you know 500 polygons tell us about you know bringing crash to life yeah that was really the the magic for me it was using silicon graphic machines at the time and I think Jason lured me to the company he's like you know Jurassic Park they used to look on graphic machines so you should work with us and like yeah that sounds like a good idea so we were doing a soft body animations which is very commonplace today and that just blew me away as an artist who was traditionally trained and that's one of the things that made the game really special was for the first time it's pretty standard now you would be crazy to make a game concept without professional concept are but we have professional designers like Jason said Joe and Charles to really help us craft this organic look which has become the the foundation of knowledge games going forward until today they are known for really pushing every system by doing these organic environments which at the time were really difficult to do like that holes pesky polygons them it was a huge problem and to do organic animation with soft with every vertex having a deformation to it was something incredibly special and just mob just inspired me and the rest of the team on the art side a very small you know pirate team that we had to do some amazing things and it was one of those moments where we there was nothing we couldn't do you know it's like why not blow up the character make him giant Blowfish like we did with crash anything was possible that that's what made it special the reason it was so important is everybody else was using bone animation so everything was very strict and then the face would be you know ice it wouldn't move at all because you had to have a bone to get it to smile and a bone to move the nose a bone to move the years the processor just couldn't handle too many bones but by storing vertices we had complete control over the character we used bones to animate it in on the computer but then baked out the vertices and very quickly it started animating by just grabbing the vertices and moving them around and that's where all the death animations came from I mean when you see crash his shoes when he dies and he disappears and leaves just his shoes the whole character is there shoved into a single vertice inside the shoe because I can control every vertice I could do any magic I could do with the vertices on every frame and that allowed us to do things you look at the squash and stretch you look at the facial animations you look at the death poses everything it allowed us to do things that no one had really done before certainly in 2d because it was all pixel based but in 3d they were still using bones and so that was a very like all these little nuances became vital parts of the success of the project but it was a conscious sort of resource choice like we were doing a character action game and Jason was basically like the character is the most important so he ended up crash head-on the first game about a third of all the polygons on the screen all in the main character and because we wanted to make him seem real alive cartoon whatever it is I but have personality because it's a character actually game and so we put all these resources towards him in fact the reason mark had a pinch hit and pinch program in there was because his animations took him too much memory they wouldn't fit on the the memory on the production PlayStation so he wrote this crazy compressor to like hat you know probably I think 8 to 1 or something like that like so that we could actually get it in the machine and get it to e3 yeah tell us a bit about designing levels for that game everyone remembers obviously the boulder level or hog-wild or all these you know there you go and you know what I think's interesting is you guys hinted this before Jason about you know the the challenges that you faced in building that gameplay because you had this limit so it's like you know an extra turtle means you know one less tree and sort of all that and Mark I'd love your perspective first on this from a gameplay perspective so the way that we did the design changed over the years so crash 1 it was the artists who are free handing it in and I want to shout out - here - Taylor Kurosaki who must have done a little over half of them just free handing the levels into into what was it Softimage or something yeah no in other words no real design you just kind of went at it and then he's Photoshop is a layout to her crash - I said I wanted to really get involved in design and so you know I set my target can I do with can I do a third of it I end up doing like 90% of levels and Jason did the last two for that but that was very different that was actually graph paper then and deserve a top-down view of it and how going to snap together all of these cleverly constructed low-poly pieces of the world to create that gameplay and then for crash 3 of course we had Dan Airy and Evan Wells joining and the same strategy with clear strobe kind of splitted up because that is a pretty heavy load to carry yeah so I think the result was the first game is very uneven and way too hard and we certainly and there were a couple there was one level road to nowhere that I designed that was unplayable and we have to keep making it easier and easier and even the version that ship be played to this day because it's too hard because I didn't know anything about level design it was just hacking at it right and then we'd made mistakes like making you earn lives so good players had infinite lives because they earn them all and bad players who needed the lives couldn't earn them which was a huge mistake her in your save games I mean who came up with that and earned lives and then the second game we took it seriously and it was much more well balanced and even and the third game I think we got to the point where we knew what we were doing and started having more fun and it just kind of became looser my understanding is on the new game they've tried to make the first game play more like the second game so it isn't the original ass-kicking hard the crash bandicoot that we met it was painful like it was there were actually levels who were painful I think two is the pinnacle of our of our design work and hopefully one now plays like that I remember that it was either crash one or costume but Mark had the idea that maybe we should have people play the game who were not testers before we should kind of kind of a revelation yeah actually with them if somebody still kind of turned to meeting maybe I shouldn't share this cuz they might not have realized it but we would have them watch the 70 hours the VHS tape and create a manual heat map showing where every player died and that established rigor on the team yes but now we have Shimizu at the top down map and he would put the little X's where you died not really that's apportion easy Sun for that but yes but but now we have rooms full of PhD people and they've made this into a science and we're pulling that information directly from games but for me that was kind of pivoted with crash to I started collecting data for where they died too and statistics for focus testing which I think was probably fairly early and unique i we were really hacking at it with the first game and i remember there were areas that were just too hard and I said we'll just throw a continue box in the middle and Mark said if it's one in a hundred to get to the next level it's one in ten to get to halfway and one to tend to get in half way it's gonna be a lot easier and oh no he's right we know one we hadn't thought about that we had no design background so we were just I just remember we've been developing and we could play it just fine and then shoo you shade of course never ends the world wide studio but in those days which are Japanese producer and Connie's counterpart in Japan is he'd gone and done a play test and so I was getting the hand written notes from these guys and reading them and it's like they're saying it's a beautiful game and I love the characters and it's too damn hard and that is just uh that is an oops moment because we only had six months left and just by really working on it you know that shipped as the most brutal crash game in the series the Japanese version was a little tuned down actually it was easier we added some continue boxes more witch doctors and stuff so going through some of the you know the levels and you know you even had some really interesting sort of you know 2d levels but with these characters like I I'm wondering you said you hacked it but that construction of you know thinking of like oh let's do a boulder level or let's do how well like how did this how do those ideas come about and we guys just sitting around and saying like oh like Indiana Jones let's do a level like that I mean you have any stories about how these came to life that that is actually pretty much how well we we had we we had the going into the screen which was the trademark but we weren't fully sure it was going to be awesome so we had the left and right because we knew that worked because that was a classic character action game and there was really only one direction left I mean we also had some vertical but that was again like old games so we had to do the in screen like it was the one thing that was left and how are you going to do that well people will just take a lot of time because you don't see what's coming so they were inching ahead really slowly to see where the pits came up and then jumping over it and that's not fun we need something to chase them Indiana Jones Boulder and and hog wild which was potentially the first forced runner which is now a staple of the mobile platform going into the screen was let's just not let the player control the forward momentum how does that work put him on a hog level we were on the lot in those days universal it was a lot of fun driving around golf carts and things and actually Amblin entertainment by Steven Spielberg's company was three buildings down from we are where we were making the game and at one point I don't think you saw this on the Naughty Dog side but on the universal side because Spielberg would come hang out a little bit is how do we tell Steven that we've ripped off his IP with the with the old temple to do boulder chase imitation is the sincerest form of flattery yeah I'm sure he's used to it were there levels that you know and ideas that didn't work out I mean we know obviously levels that we saw but I mean were there any things that you know God tons there's far more game that didn't get in and game the gun in our first level layout tools and he said we laid it out in Photoshop the first tool that we built was red pixels a tree a yellow pixels of Bush they can't go in the same place because you can't have two pixels on top of each other then we'd have another layer for the boxes and stuff and it was an open kind of open-world game that didn't work from a polygon standpoint so we had an early level that was a lava level I remember that was in an early video but we realized crashes lava color no lava actually a play over one that shipped on crash one that people in the inner you can find on the internet there's some hack to get it playable like a different version of the rainy one I think it's called slippery climb or maybe that's the one that did ship I can't remember the it's really difficult that's why I didn't ship it was huge in the longest level in crash and very difficult we didn't have time to get it tuned down and so it's just on the disk but not in the actual shipped game we're like like Andy said the for using Photoshop as a level editing tool was a burden and a gift because as a small team it was going to be impossible to put these you know hundreds of thousands of Poly's levels together might you know mind you we only have limitation of 1304 per frame but looking at that pixel vomit at that first few levels was that was my job and Taylor's job to look at and try to to make sense out of it it was a mess and the results were not spectacular and I remember having by the end of the game you saw through the nature you could look at the Photoshop file an airy and save the level when Dan area Ivan joined the company it's like how do you what I'm like yeah that's the scene that range of colors between 1 and 150 that means it's a ground level that thing is an object this shape goes here they're like okay so yeah it was it was a very challenging thing but I think one of the things that saved us was using out-of-the-box thinking and using Photoshop as a level editing tool that looks up RGB values of a pixel and turns that into geometry and to mention that if you changed one pixel to see the to see the new version you had a run for eight hours yeah you got pretty sophisticated too we had like a color mapping onto it we had like bump mapping on it to it by crash to I think it was really an amazing thing to work with and and I had actually a good time working on it so how late would the levels get locked in the game like crash because I assumed you could build a level in a couple of you know a day or clocks locked the day before it went to go were there were there big shifts cuz I mean could you sort of like a month before so like I'll let's scrap this level let's build a new one like how iterative was it towards you and Connie I mean from your end I'm sure you had to keep them on track and giggling um yeah I think we did find a cache bug in the last boss in the game at 2:00 in the morning the day we were supposed to go master and I think we ended up having to put somebody might have been me on a plane to pick up the gold master from Andy didn't we do the handoff I Drive down to LAX isn't frequently the way they're good when it got really bad would put people on planes to Terre Haute Indiana where we made the game but it was pretty late one of the innovations with crash 3 was internet fast enough to upload the disk we actually had a stewardess that we would hand the it was it was too much to give the CD to the go in and give it to United which had the shuttle back then to give it to them and deal with it so we had a stewardess who we would hand the disc to that would then on the other side hand the 450 bucks she would hand the disc to someone from Sony it was a fastest way to get things back and forth and she wasn't alone we were on the flights the discs were on the flight tip three 911 do not try this now we sound old the other the other thing about the level building was that it would again it took eight hours to build every level and what it was doing is it was drawing every frame that the camera could see because the camera was on a path a color for every polygon that it drew and then at the end it would look for every color for every polygon and see which ones actually remained visible so if you covered up a polygon it wouldn't see it anymore and it would take that polygon out of the draw list that's great but you get this draw list that is quite large so then it would try to compress that tell me if I'm wrong in all this stuff Annie and it would go through multiple types of compression to see if any of them because it was almost random noise which one of them had the best possible output and it could be this kind of compression for one level another kind of compression for another level and again this took a long time and every now and then you'd run it and it would just say no compression works and there was no good reason for it so you just have to take out a tree or put in it and it would just work or not work in eight hours so that was the level actually the the compression was deterministic but the memory packing of the level was you simulated annealing with a random element like that's what you're talking about yeah and so I'm gonna get bad flashback because that we were working up to like you know God knows what hours of the morning and just waiting for that build and like oh god you gotta do it again I need some sleep and every computer in the office was SGI's they all said it when they finish their part of the level because it was a networked back before Network it was big level completed so you'd hear level complete level completed level completed on every computer then you'd rush to see if it actually worked and if something was out of place you started over and it was another eight hours eight hours yeah so we were doing this up until the very last minute but the very last minute had to be eight hours earlier and you had to hope which really meant sixteen hours earlier and you had to hope it was it was horrific if you had to rerun all the levels that was like a two-day affair oh uh you know you guys made three incredible crash games and then you know when ps2 came along you were very public about the idea of leaving crash behind and like creating this new universe jak and daxter for sort of the next generation tell us about that decision for Naughty Dog to you know sort of move on from the franchise because I'm sure was something that you know a lot of people wanted to see more games for a long time - wondering well you know would not go back what would happen tell us about the decision to sort of uh you know leave crash behind well I think there were a lot of reasons I mean one of them was just contractual and structural we didn't we didn't own crash universal did we were building it Sony was financing it yet money was continually falling out if you will to Universal it didn't make a lot of financial sense present Universal what's a great sets to Universal it didn't make a lot of sense to us and by that time mark was no longer with Universal he was consulting with Naughty Dog directly effectively a naughty dog part of the team and the other thing was crash was made for the PlayStation we felt we did everything we could to make crash work on the PlayStation the reason he has black gloves is the lighting was so bad on so few polygons that he just was an orange mess and you couldn't track his hand crossing the rest of his body when he was running so having black gloves gave you that visual cue like the way he had only a few spots on his back was because those were the Polly's we chose to have texture on we couldn't texture all of them and we knew it was Sonic's ask game you were looking at his back so we put the Polly's on his back that that's where the textures are everything about crash was made to work on the PlayStation one size of his head for the resident you're working with sizes although how low is the resolution they're 512 240 is that right we use your DP right yeah 240p exactly we use 50% more resolution than most ps1 games because we used the 512 mode yeah there were 320 320 and running it less than 30 frames a second most of the time and V Blanc issues and everything I mean it was a mess so when we looked at the future we thought should we take this baggage with us or should we take advantage of what at that time looked like a super computer to us in the ps2 and do something that works for the ps2 open-world all these other things that were becoming trendy and we just made the decision for that and the business reasons to try something new with Jack plus after you work for six years like seven days a week you know 14 hours a day on the same thing it seems creatively more exciting to try a new character and we actually tried to kill crash like in CTR we said what won't anybody believe because this is our last game let's put aliens in well bring an alien no one will like crash after that because there's an alien this will be the end we've jumped the shark the alien came into CTR everybody loved it so you know it was uh you know so many years without crash and now there's been this sort of resurgence there's always been that nostalgia but you know uncharted 4 of course I think I think by now we can probably spoil it but there is a cameo from crash which was there there's the the new remake the curious visions is doing that's coming out shortly looks great tell us about this sort of uh you know this resurgence interesting crash I mean is something like popping up an uncharted for I'm sure you guys had the inside word but you know Connie from your perspective that must have been there very special to see that happen it was very special to see that happen and it was it was pretty close collaboration we have a really spectacular third-party relations team at Sony and they worked very closely with Activision that's the team that has produced the new version of crash and we working on uncharted 4 at the team at Naughty Dog wanted to include that crash cameo and her third party relations group reached out to Activision they gave us permission I think there were a couple things that that we did in return um I think crash has a cameo in one of their properties or maybe uncharted does and then of course the remaster came up as an opportunity and we all got to see it recently it looks spectacular it's been a good experience that was a surreal moment in my life playing uncharted for Jeunet did you know that was happening no actually was it was a very awesome surprise cuz I was like oh my god a character that I created is playing another character that I helped create and and I'm playing their game this is this is really strange and I couldn't there was nobody in a room that I could really from the original eight just Justin and Charlotte are still at Naughty Dog is that right so none of the three you you worked on uncharted one Andy and I did not so we had we had left right as it was getting made of the company to Sony and that was the end of our jak and daxter period so we saw it being made but did not have input into it uh you know obviously crash now there's so much interesting crash and you know master people will get to relive those games which is great do you think you know from your end the character of crash and the type of gameplay is there room do you think for new crash games I mean is that the kind of thing like the you know the concept of it I mean the gameplay and uncharted four and even now it's like it still it still holds up do you guys think I mean would you like to see crash sort of continue forward new game what would that what kind of games you think that could be would it be real 3d I mean crashes his own character he goes off and does whatever he wants to do I think it's great that there's this nostalgia period where we're bringing it back that twenty years ago is when I think a lot of people want to play with their kids now that played it when they were younger want to play with their kids remember the first game so I think that's fantastic there is a very good question whether or not crash is a character that after the nostalgia of doing the games we've already made do you take the character and do something new do something more contemporary that speaks to this generation of gamer and I don't know that would be a challenge because again we kind of left crash thinking that he was ps1 yeah it was way too early for nostalgia but it was also for us a little too late for that character to move into the world the Jack took up much I think much better and then eventually the Uncharted world that needed a more adult character needed real world wouldn't worked with cartoony characters to do Uncharted it wouldn't wouldn't have had the same impact I I don't know if you go back and take a character from Playstation and can make them relevant beyond the nostalgia so that remains to be seen when I pressures a great character but he actually strikes this subtle balance that we managed while trying to but to hit luckily the time between sort of childish and a sort of postmodern irony and so it's a tightrope you actually kind of have to walk with him so it's not to fall over into cheesy like or or just straight parody because it's not quite what he is he's sincere but also ironic like and when he hits those notes like you know he's really appealing I've taken so much time asking my own questions I do want to give least one person the audience a chance to ask a question of this team raise your hand if you have a question not you crash ah maybe this guy right down here in the front corner got a mic over to he's running down or coming from multiple directions hey Hayden um I really love the first crash games uh but like I know you mentioned especially the challenges of working on a new on new hardware in competition of Mario what were some of the hardest points in development for the first games this filly oh god just getting it on screen was it put up about a 12-month process before we actually had anything that resembled a level we went through a lot of trial and error right mark I think the the first level that was a keeper was the fifth level that was made and it was about a six-week process of think of something new make it in Photoshop check it out in my app late in the game it was some dark times I remember some closed-door conversations rehearing yelling from the other side with Jason and II and Mark and trying to figure out what's going on the Russell took me you think we're gonna continue Ivana though so a heartbeat Crash Bandicoot was gonna be in cyberspace right cuz we just couldn't crack the puzzle of how to do your entire background with 500 polygons so I was good I remember there was stuff where it looked like it was white triangle like that was gonna be the level point was gonna be more the first level that worked was I can't remember what it's called in crash one but you're running around on sort of stone platforms like in in kind of a dark cavern and you really basically that one was the first one we made work because the there really wasn't much of a background to some sort of like stone things that kind of loomed out of the shadows so that we could focus on the the gameplay elements because after the animation character thank you man we work and we painted all the textures because we didn't have like lighting systems like you know all the robust game development tools that you have today so we just did all we could to maximize the number of you know they're using our texture count and it actually started to look like something that was promising but by remember it was not a slam-dunk whatsoever well we are unfortunately at a time but on behalf of everyone here let's get these guys around applause with the contribution they've made the gaming industry with crash thank you so much mark Connie Bob Andy Jason ah we'll see you guys a few minutes with our next panel thanks again guys for schenke thank you [Applause]

Channel: gameslice

Views: 68,699

Keywords: crash bandicoot, e3 coliseum, e3 2017

Id: fqjkAXCgx7M

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017