The first time Taylor Kurosaki and Bob Rafei saw a running PlayStation, they were in a Las Vegas hotel room. It was the 1995 Consumer Electronics Show. They, along with the company they worked for, Naughty Dog, were being given a behind-closed-doors look at Sony's first foray into the game console industry.

When they describe the event now, they use words like "inspiring" and "enthralled" and phrases like "blown away."

They didn't know it at the time, but the members of Naughty Dog in that room — Kurosaki, Rafei and co-founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin — were looking at the system that would host the team's next game: Crash Bandicoot. They were seeing the console their company would eventually create the unofficial mascot for — the console they would develop Naughty Dog's first smash hit for. It was Kurosaki and Rafei's second day with the company.

Naughty Dog released Crash Bandicoot for Sony's original PlayStation in September 1996. In it, the team took an old idea and changed its point of view, redesigning the idea of a 2D sidescroller and planting the camera behind its protagonist's back for the majority of the game.

To learn more about what happened along the way, we recently spoke to the entire development team, contractors, musicians, marketers and others, hearing a story of long nights, groundbreaking technology, unbearable crunches and expensive parties. However, not every story lines up the same way, with some feeling that Naughty Dog discredited their contributions by burying who actually created the flagship character.

One thing rings true throughout: The tales culminate in the creation of a game that redefined the platformer genre and laid some of the early cornerstones for making Naughty Dog the juggernaut development studio it is today.

Andy and Jason’s cross-country adventure

Naughty Dog initially consisted only of Rubin and Gavin. The two met in Hebrew school when they were children. Sharing a passion for video games, they teamed up to make their own, with Rubin as the chief artist and Gavin as chief programmer. The duo's first release was an educational game called Math Jam, independently published in 1985 by JAM Software — the team's name before switching to Naughty Dog.

The duo's fifth release was the moderately successful Rings of Power, published by Electronic Arts for Sega's Genesis in 1991. Rubin and Gavin used the money made from Rings of Power to self-fund the development of their next release, Way of the Warrior, a fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat, but it had no publisher.

The two shopped Way of the Warrior around before striking a deal with Universal Studios' new video game division, Universal Interactive. It would publish the game on 3DO while Naughty Dog created a new IP for the company. Gavin and Rubin set out from Boston to Los Angeles, drafting ideas for their next game along the way.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Crystal Dynamics was going to go with it, and 3DO itself was interested. A friend of ours at 3DO had introduced us to Skip Paul who was head of the business development at Universal. He was basically the number three guy in those days under Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, and he was putting together a new wing of Universal [for] video games. [Paul] had been president of Atari in the "golden era," actually, across the crash. In part of that, too, he introduced us to Mark Cerny who was like his first hire, and there was one business guy, too. Basically, we really liked the guys. It was small and cool and Skip is a great salesman — I'm still friends with him — and we're like, "Let's go to California!" They offered us free office space on the Universal lot and stuff like that.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We didn't have everything we owned in that car, but we had everything we owned either in that car or the truck that was following us. We were moving from Boston, where Andy was [working on] his master's degree at MIT, to Hollywood. And we didn't know Hollywood because neither of us had [been] there, but we were going to work on Universal's backlot, so a lot of what we were talking about is what Hollywood would do to video games. ... [We] drove it straight. I've done it three times in my life. It's long. It's about 36 to 40 hours, depending on how you drive. So we probably slept once, maybe, in there.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We did actually sleep twice [laughs]. We slept in Chicago in some dive hotel, motel or something near Chicago, and then somewhere in the mountains, like in Colorado or Utah or something in some other motel or whatever. Jason, I and Morgan — that was [Jason's] dog — in my Honda Accord. We just burned across. But it does have the infamous junction that became Crash Bandicoot. Because we had a bunch of other game ideas floating around. We were trying to figure out what our next game was. It was definitely going to be in 3D. We thought about trying to do a Final Fight-type game in 3D ... and then we're just like, "The platform games like Donkey Kong Country and Mario Whatever, there's nothing at all in 3D."

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) So we talked about a lot of things having to do with character design and story that generally we wouldn't have spoken about in the past and really decided that we wanted to start to mix story into games. Which now seems like a stupid idea — of course you would do that — but back then nobody had really done it. It was either a game or it was a story, and we were thinking about that really early. The other thing we were thinking about is, "How do you get a 2D game, like Sonic or Mario or Donkey Kong Country, into 3D? How do you do that?" Because you're so used to jumping in a side-scroller and judging the distance by exactly what you see on the screen, which doesn't change in distance. But in 3D on a 2D screen, it's very hard to judge how far one side of a platform is, or a hole is, to the other side. So, how do we do that and how do we tell a story?

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was us two and the dog, having conversations [laughs]. Yeah, it's just the way Jason and I work. We were constantly just like chewing ideas for things, not actually who Crash was or anything, but the sort of core idea that we wanted to pursue in terms of gameplay.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) The game we designed for ourselves we called "Sonic's Ass," because it was turning Sonic into the screen, in which case you'd be looking a lot at his ass. And it was a game that we thought was going to be very story driven. Crash Bandicoot ended up not being story driven, and that was mainly [because] the technology wasn't there yet on PlayStation. Our budget wasn't there yet. Nothing was there yet. But we wrote the entire story for Crash and were going to cut back and forth between the game and [cutscenes]. ... That was the quest Naughty Dog set out on as we were coming across country … "How do we create a game in which the story is that interwoven in with the game, and how do you this in 3D?"

The Thighmaster

In August 1994, Rubin, Gavin and Morgan reached Universal's backlot and their new office. Rubin and Gavin quickly got to work on two things: the Sonic's Ass game and hiring their first official employees.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) There [were] celebrities everywhere. I have a thousand anecdotes of having some celebrity walk by us or something. This is one thing about it: Part of our deal with Universal was that we got to bring our dog on the lot, and there was no other dog allowed on the lot. The gentleman that brought us to Universal, Skip Paul, still one of my best friends, managed to get us a badge. So I had a dog on the backlot of Universal. She was an amazing dog; my daughter is now named after this dog. [She] was huge. She cornered Sylvester Stallone in an elevator. ... We were next to "The Suzanne Somers Show," so Suzanne Somers gave me a signed Thighmaster, which was stolen by somebody because it was such a cool thing to have. It's crazy times. The stories, they're just insane from back then.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was a mixture of big and little in weird ways. There's such a hodgepodge of stuff over there. We were sandwiched in right next to Amblin. We occasionally would see him in the distance, but we never [met] Spielberg, and because it was right next to Amblin, there was also the Shoah project there.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Pretty much [we plugged in our computers and started day one]. That's how we lived our lives. To this day, I get home, I plug in the computer and I go. Yes, that's how it was.

The Naughty Dogs

Naughty Dog's first round of employees featured an old friend, an employee from the office downstairs and one artist above the company's pay rate.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) There was nothing we had in mind exactly [when looking for employees]. … But really, it was a very tight little band and that wasn't [done] consciously; It was just sort of like who worked in games at the time combined with who gravitated to us and who sort of matched our energy level.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I can tell you our interview process was what you would expect from two 24-year-olds that had never interviewed anyone before. We just went with it.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) Andy and I were both part of a program at MIT called the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I actually met Andy in April. We started in September like you usually do, and I met him that previous April, and he was literally the first person I talked to at MIT. He was coming in at the same time as me, and I told him, "Hey, I like making games." And he said, "Oh. I've been selling games since I was in seventh grade. I've sold six games. My last one was published through EA and sold [x] number of copies." So I was like, "Well, I guess this just happens when you go to MIT." I was a hobbyist game programmer and this guy had been doing it commercially for 10 years. ... The funny thing is I had never stepped foot in Los Angeles before I moved there. And the first day I was in Los Angeles — literally the first day — we were driving on the 405 and the entire hill was on fire. So, basically, you're driving on this highway and it's completely covered in smoke and I'm like, "What the hell have I done? [Laughs] I'm living in this crazy place where things are on fire."

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) [Dave is] similar to Andy; he was also a very brilliant programmer. Not the most physical guy, so when we went snowboarding I think he was the one that struggled the most.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I was working on the backlot of Universal Studios. I was in visual effects. ... Jason and Andy were basically exactly my age and we sort of hit it off and, you know, I would go up and visit them upstairs where they were working and they would come down and visit me. The stuff I was working on — I was using Lightwave; I was working on [Commodore] Amiga computers. And they were using Alias Wavefront, which was running on Silicon Graphics workstations. I knew of Alias Wavefront and Silicon Graphics because "Jurassic Park" had just come out a couple years prior while I was at Universal Studios and all that stuff was done on those really high-end workstations. I thought, "Wow, that would be super cool to work on these high-end workstations," and I said something to that effect to Jason, and he goes, "Well, why don't you come work with us? We never even thought to ask you to come work with us because we thought you were too busy doing what you're doing." And I said, "No. That sounds fun. Let's do it," and I promptly moved upstairs and started modeling wumpa fruit and things of that nature.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) He was your typical LA USC student, so very much into the social circle, your kind of Los Angeles surfer dude guy. Very relaxed, very fun to hangout with, very comfortable.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) [Taylor] is like a guy that you want to hang out with and be his friend because he's so nice, so funny, so interesting, so approachable and easy to talk to.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) [Jason and Andy] pitched me hard on, "We got this awesome company that we started and we're at Universal in the middle of Hollywood, working with Silicon Graphics machines. We're going to go after a really awesome gaming system called [the PlayStation]. Have you heard of it?"

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I remember Sega was after [Rafei] and we couldn't pay what Sega could pay because we were a small independant that was making games for Universal that didn't want to overinvest in the market.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) We spent a day [hanging out]. They showed me some early stuff that they're working on and really just had a good time walking around Universal and just, you know, shooting the shit. At the end of the day, when it was time to talk about the actual offer, Jason and his big personality said, "You know what? Go do the rest of your interviews." Because I had job offers from Sega San Francisco, Sega Institute, from, I think, Crystal Dynamics and another visual effects company, I think called 4Ward Productions, with a 4. And they said, "Just go do your interviews and then when you're ready, let's talk." So, I was like, "Alright, that's pretty ballsy, but alright." So that left a pretty good impression, and ultimately after doing all the interviews, the kind of camaraderie and kind of the garage band feeling of the company, and being in L.A., just kind of won me over.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I remember looking at [Bob] and knowing he was looking at Andy and I and going, "Let me get this straight. I'm interviewing at Sega, one of the biggest video game companies in the world" — and at that time, at the top of the world, right? The Genesis and everything else had been out, the Dreamcast was coming. I mean, Sega was Sega. "And you two are 23 and 24 years old, and it's two of you and you're telling me that you're going to be a better place to work than Sega?" And I said, "Yes," and I convinced him.

Creating Willy

To give its new game a Saturday morning cartoon vibe, Naughty Dog contracted two traditional animation artists early in the development process. They, with direction from Naughty Dog, created the game's characters, environments and tone.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We hired some cartoon designers who had done Fievel and a bunch of other major productions, Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. [We] started immediately working with them. They were incredibly instrumental in setting the look of Crash Bandicoot.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) I've been working in the animation industry, like Charles, since the early '80s, and a producer who was working at Universal Studios in their animation department named [Will Meugniot] recommended me to the Universal Interactive people as a really good person to bring on to Crash.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) So we had a meeting with them. It went really well, and it was Jason Rubin, Andy Gavin, [Rob Biniaz], who was the head of Universal Interactive at the time, and another guy named David Siller, who was going to produce the game. I showed them my portfolio. They really liked it a lot and they got really excited about what they were seeing and it just kind of developed from there.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) We had an agreement for me to design and act as an animation consultant to develop character and background designs. I wrote the original concept bible for the [game]. They had the idea of setting it on an island. They had the villain, some stuff like that, but they didn't really have any kind of backstory. So I wrote a very detailed backstory for Crash and Neo Cortex and set it on the three islands, which was based on the idea of the remnants of the lost continent of Lemuria.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) They wanted to come up with something that was going to be an iconic character. They were telling us this was going to be, like, a groundbreaking game and they wanted something iconic like Mario and Sonic.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We drew from this big sort of pop culture pool, which included, like, every major video game made, '80s movies, "Goonies," "Raiders," and "Back to the Future" and classic cartoons. That's what Crash is: It's a melange of a bunch of guys who grew up in the '80s [drawing from their] pop culture, video game/TV/movie/comic/cartoon influences.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We got a book from some bookstore that showed Tasmanian marsupials, and of course you had hedgehogs and echidnas and [the] Tasmanian tiger was in there; Tasmanian devil was in there and, of course, bandicoots and wombats. No one had done a wombat, so we thought, "That's a cool name. We'll just grab 'wombat.'"

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) There was a lot of concept art. It was first called Willy the Wombat. … [Pearson's] design was of this weasly-looking character with a big nose, [wearing] like a Zorro mask, so it had his face covered. You could see his eyes and he had this stupid grin on his face and really an unorthodox shape of a body. Then Charles started adopting toward that and really further fleshed it out.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) I put forward a couple of designs like that, and the one that looks sort of Zorro-like became the design for Crash and they just took the mask off his face. ... It was basically the model for Crash but with a ninja headpiece on.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) I was doing more of a squat, hunkered-down character. I was just trying different things, you know? I was just trying different things and going in different directions. Joe made him kind of longer and leaner and goofy. I was trying to make him look a little more manic and insane. We kind of blended those two together. [We] went with what Joe was doing stylistically and I took that kind of crazy, nutty thing that was happening and I blended it into what Joe was doing.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Charles was a super fast sketch artist, he could draw a version of Crash in, like, a minute and a half. So, you could say like, "What would he look like crying? What would he look like courting a girl?" Or whatever. And he would draw this version that just looked exactly like you would imagine, like a Warner Bros. character showing some particular emotion, like the nail biting or the fringy little look or whatever it was. He knew how to turn any little emotion or nuance into that sort of exaggerated, cutesy style, [that] classic cartoon style, and it was exactly what we wanted. We could spend one minute describing a level to Joe and he'd come up with great sketches that basically looked like the game ended up looking. So he, like Charles but with different stuff, had a great ability to translate kind of a vague description into an actual look and make it consistent from one level to another.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) The money wasn't big; I'll be honest. I agreed to the terms. We probably should've been paid double that; it might have been more fair. But that's not Naughty Dog's fault. They made an offer and I took it, right? So I'm not trying to lay any blame on them for the money. But considering that the money was OK but not great, the process went really smoothly — which it did. Probably we did a lot more work than the money was worth, you know?

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) We fulfilled the terms of the contract as far as everything we needed to give them. And it was a lousy contract ... I'll tell you that right now. It was just absolutely terrible. The lawyer that Joe was using was just an idiot, and I don't mean that as a personal slight against him. It's just like, you know, this is a major property that we're developing and he negotiated it as a work-for-hire deal. We kind of did it because Naughty Dog was reassuring the both of us that this is the beginning of something big and, "Help us out now, because our budget isn't that big. Help us out now, give us a deal and later on, it'll pay off for you." So that's kind of the way that we did it. Joe, he was negotiating all that stuff. I was just taking a back seat and I never really felt comfortable with the whole deal. I didn't really make any money on it. I didn't make any money on Crash. I just made a little bit of money.

The team gets bigger

Several months into development, Naughty Dog brought in the last three people who worked on Crash Bandicoot: a junior programmer turned sound engineer after Naughty Dog cancelled a PlayStation port of Way of the Warrior, a film veteran and a kid.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I was working at a company down in Orange County called Laser Graphics. It was my first real programming job out of college. ... I'm not sure exactly how Naughty Dog got my resume, but I guess it was still floating around out there from when I was looking for that job — I had just started less than a year before that. So they contacted me and we talked about it. Of course I was interested. I had always been interested in working for a game company. Actually, it was interesting: I had almost convinced myself that I wasn't going to take the job, even told my boss, "Yeah, OK, I'm definitely going to stay." And then after meeting with them, I called him up as I was driving home because I had just had this overwhelming sense of dread that I had to take this opportunity. I had to try it out.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) Dan, to us, signified our first steps at going more sort of big time. The fact that Andy and Dave were no longer enough programming power for us kind of really meant that the scale of our production was getting bigger. The fact that Dan came in and he was going to be this programmer that was specifically audio, that, to me, signaled a real shift in [the] scale of this kind of thing and where it was headed.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) There were already, what, seven there when I started? There were seven guys.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) I thought it was six?

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) It might have been six.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) I think you were the seventh.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) OK, I guess I was the seventh. So, I was the first non-male that worked at Naughty Dog [laughs]. I found it actually to be a really welcoming place. It was a lot of fun. Everybody was young, you know? There was a lot of noise. I remember when I came for my interview, Jason met me. [He was] walking down the hallway and all I saw was Jason and a big, black dog, and I thought, "Wow. This place is great" [laughs]. It was nice to have a dog in the office. The interview was me having to meet everybody in the company, all seven of them, six of them — whatever it was — and I had to take an art test. It was kind of low stress. [There] was a lot of work to do, but it was exciting, something I had never seen before. I had come from doing compositing and texturing for film stuff, so it was a really very different environment.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) I remember when Andy and Jason hired her, we had this meeting before she joined which was like, "OK guys, we've gotta clean up our act. We cannot keep acting like this. We're hiring this woman." But, actually it didn't really matter. She was totally fine with whatever craziness and actually participated in a lot of it.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Oh, the first time she burped we all started laughing our asses off. I think we all had this collective sigh, "Oh good. We're not going to get sued."

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) It felt like she was an in-demand, industry professional and chose to work with us. That felt like it gave us some validity on some level, that someone that could go work at other places would choose to come to work at Naughty Dog.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) [Somehow] a headhunter gave me a call and I got an interview with Mark Cerny at Universal Interactive and went in there for associate producer under Mark. ... I didn't get the job. But I ended up finding out that Naughty Dog needed an IT person, and at that time, I was a game designer for several Super Nintendo games and had tinkered with computers, and I was like, "You know what? I'll try something different." So I went in for an interview, and I got it and have been at Naughty Dog ever since '96.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) Well, the thing I remember most is that he was the youngest one at the company so I used to always think of him as the kid. And even now I still sometimes think of him as the kid, though he's no longer the youngest person. He was the baby of the company.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) He would eat anything. I just remember Justin having a bag of uncooked spaghetti, and, over a span of three or four days, the whole bag would be gone because he would just kind of chew on it and slowly work his way through it. And I'm like, "Justin, you can cook that, you know?"

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) And, [matza] bread! I would steal Suzanne Somers' writers' matza bread because I was hungry.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) He had this uncanny ability to trigger bugs. ... We'd test something and think, "OK. This is pretty solid, let's unleash Justin on it." In five minutes he'd find five bugs that we had to go fix. He'd pick up the controller and bam, something would fail.

The damn triangle

With its team assembled, Naughty Dog began discovering what was possible with its new game, all the while learning the new technology it was given to work with: Sony's original PlayStation.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) It was kind of like stepping into the unknown everyday. ... Like, the type of game we were making was brand new and so every day was solving a whole bunch of problems and inventing new processes.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) [The hardware] was so new that basically it was a PCI card you could stick in your PC. You didn't even have a development console. You just had a board that you would stick in your PC. So the first thing you have to do when you get a new piece of hardware like that is spend a month or two figuring out just how to do anything. You're in this mode [Gavin calls] the "no-show problem." All you're trying to do is put a triangle on the screen [laughs], and for the longest time you can't get the damn triangle to show up. Nothing shows up, and then eventually you have a breakthrough where you figure out how to make this stupid triangle show up. Then you're off to the races, because then you can draw things.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) [Anything] was possible because we were just messing around with, "What is a 3D character? How do you create a scene?" We didn't know anything about fake lighting and vertex shading and things like that, so we were pasting textures onto these very primitive [3D] geometries and trying to recreate the concept art.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We kept going and going and going, and then eventually I built the model and we had 532 polygons for Crash. I remember I was told to get it in under 600. I got it down to 532. Which, you know, an eyeball in a modern game is probably more than 500 polygons, so it was just insane that we could get that working, and we were off.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) [SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic. There's no texture on it. [The PlayStation] had this mode for that which was very fast, so our thought was that we could do the characters primarily using the shaded mode, because it was much faster and it would enable us to have high polygon characters with sort of fluid shapes instead of big, blocky men. And it turned out to be true. No one else used the shading. Everyone else used the full textured mode [because] it reduced your poly count, like, dramatically. We used the textured polygons in the backgrounds for the most part — almost exclusively — and the shaded polygons in the characters. They worked well with our cartoon style.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) [There were] a lot of levels that we had to throw out, and because we were just a small team trying to create all these environments, we ran into a major problem of, "How do you actually put together these massive worlds?" Because then we're talking about, when you assemble all these scenes together, a couple hundred thousand [polygons], which the computers at the time would choke on, and we were just running out of time. It would take so long to precompute and do these things, so again another brilliant choice from Dave Baggett and Andy Gavin was to use Photoshop as a level editing tool.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Dave created the DLE, the Dave's Level Editor, and when it would crash, all the SGIs would say, "The Dave's Level Editor has now crashed," and it was Dave's voice and sometimes it would be a barking dog that got stepped on.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I would work in Photoshop [with the DLE]. I would make a very crude image in Photoshop, and it looked like the level. If you looked at it and if you sort of squinted, it looked like a bitmap, top-down view of the level I was making. You could see the path. You could see how it would split and how it would come back together, how it would go left and it would go right. And [using] that crude image that I made, I would assign RGB value to a certain pixel.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) [We also] did very, very aggressive precomputations of the scenes. Which, basically, is the reason why [the] frames of our game had a lot more polygons than every other game at the time. Essentially what we did was, every polygon that ended up on the screen we had already rendered on our SGI workstations ahead of time so that we could figure out [the order] of the polygons. You want to draw them from farthest away to nearest, right? But, the question is, how do you figure that out? How do you figure out which is the farthest away and then the next farthest away? That's a sorting problem and the PlayStation didn't have hardware to do that. So we basically did that ahead of time and then stored not only the list in order, but also that meant, let's say, you had a big tree that was in front of some other object, so therefore it would occlude the other object. That meant that you didn't have to even draw the polygons that were behind the tree. They just weren't there at all. That meant that we [were] only drawing polygons that were ultimately visible and so even though we might have been rendering 2,000 polygons or 2,400 — something in that ballpark — it looked more like we were rendering 5,000.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) Our job as the art team was to make sure that we had occluders. Basically it was [to make sure there were] enough walls and statues and tree trunks and rocks that were able to hide the rest of the world. So as the camera went through this precomputed list of geometry, it was rendering the geometry [in] real time. So it wasn't like it was actually rendering a film or anything. It was just showing you only the 1,000 [polygons] on any given screen. So as the camera is moving, it looked like you were going in through a scene that was 30, 40, 50,000 polygons.

The importance of boxes

Despite all the work they were doing, all the technology they were developing, the developers at Naughty Dog ran into one big problem while creating Crash Bandicoot: It wasn't fun. The game was boring. Naughty Dog felt it needed something to busy up the levels, to give players something to do with their time while playing.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) One of the fascinating things is that you can do an incredibly compelling visual tour de force and have it not be fun at all. Right? In fact, lots of games that are shipped are not fun at all. ... There's a moment where you have what's called "first alpha," then you have "first playable," and nobody talks about "first fun." But there is always a moment where it's actually fun, and if you never hit that moment, you're sort of screwed. The game's just not going to be good.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was a Saturday, I remember. [Jason and I] were going to work and we stopped at Togo's to get some subs. And I remember the conversation. We knew we needed something in the levels to busy them up. They were too sparse. They were boring. And we're like, "We can't afford anything," [but] Jason really wanted something that was 3D. I'm like, "Well we need something that's 2D, because we just can't afford enough polygons. We've used all the polygons already with all your ... like, 300 polygon creatures that look so good, but they're using too many polygons. We don't have any extra polygons." And he's like, "Well, what's the simplest 3D thing we can do?" And I'm like, "Well, a box!" [laughs].

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was late [in development]. ... We had a very limited number of polygons, as I said, 3,000. When you draw Crash with 532 of them and you start to draw trees and rocks and everything in the background, your creatures [and] your enemies are not going to have a lot of polygons. Which is why they're turtles, which have very small legs and not much going on, and they're not more complicated creatures. We tended to have really, really simple enemies, because that was where we saved our polygon count. Also, you couldn't have a lot of them on screen. You had two turtles on screen? Fine. You had three turtles on screen? Problem. The distance between turtles had to be great enough — this is the first level, if you go back and play the first level — you just couldn't have a lot of turtles next to each other. And that meant there was a lot of running between turtles. What are you going to do when you're running between turtles? And I remember we were heading toward CES, we were almost Alpha, and I was playing the game and I'm like, "This is boring. There's just way too much time in between the characters. There's nothing to do. We need a pick up, and we also need something to do," and we came up with the idea of crates.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It just didn't seem hard to program and the art was really easy. Jason went and did the box art for all of the boxes before I was done programming the first one. By the end of that Saturday, by the time we went out and found some other bad food at probably nine or 10 at night, he had drawn and I had programmed up regular boxes, TNT boxes — nitro boxes came in the next game — question mark boxes, bouncing boxes. Maybe the bouncing boxes happened the next day; I don't remember, but most of them. ... Within two days, they were all programmed — not that there weren't lots and lots of tweaks to that code — and we were like, "Ah, this is the most awesome bang for the buck [laughs]."

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) And, like, from Friday to Monday the game became fun.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Once we'd [thrown] crates in there, we got this idea: "Let's make this a puzzle. Let's put in TNT crates that you have to get away from. If you spin it, it blows up. How about a nitro crate? If you even touch it, it goes off. Let's put all these different types of crates in there." And we did, and I remember vividly, and this is not a very intense development process, but I remember Mark Cerny walking in, he was our producer, and he's like, "Are we ready for alpha?" "Hey Mark, check out these crates." "What are you working on? I thought we were going to work on this other thing. Oh my God, these crates, what a waste of time." "Actually, they're really good." And the crates made Crash. It was just one of those things, it was a moment of realization that ended up not only fixing the boredom problem [but] actually creating a good deal of the interactions you go through.

Creeping out Sony

Initially, Naughty Dog planned Crash Bandicoot to be a multiplatform game. But after receiving early specs for Sony's then upcoming PlayStation console, the team began to want the machine to be the new game's only home. It had a plan for how to achieve that goal: The PlayStation, unlike Sega and Nintendo, didn't have a mascot. So Naughty Dog would create one.

Once signed on, the higher-ups at Sony began taking a closer look at the game and what it was doing with the PlayStation, and they were surprised with what they saw.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was like an opening, like a doorway that we were driving for, but it seemed a long shot. But we were aiming [to create Sony's mascot] the whole time and we happened to get through it. But it made sense, and we had picked it because we thought it might make sense. We felt more likely [that] we would have just brought it out and people would have just done it themselves, made the association themselves. ... Even though Sony kept saying, "Oh, it's not the mascot," they couldn't help it. It just became so.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We were crazy to think we could fill that. We were, like I said, three or four 24 to 28-year-olds and Mark at the time. We were not Miyamoto. We were not Naka. We were not legends in the industry. We were forgotten in the industry; we had made average games.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) Once [Sony] decided they were going to publish it, they started really studying it, and they had this analyzer tool, which is like a hardware-based analyzer where they could sort of probe the [PlayStation] as it was running and see what the game was doing. The first thing that totally freaked them out was this idea that the game was constantly reading from the CD at 300 kilobytes a second, because their models of how long the [CD drive] would last [were] based on occasional access, not constant access. They were very worried that if they shipped this game, all the PlayStations in the world would break because their CD drives would melt.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) There's tons of space on the disc, and in most cases they didn't even use it because there's just not enough memory. It would get two megs of RAM. So I had this idea about how you could use virtual memory [to] basically allow much bigger levels. Like, Crash levels ended up being 32 [to] 40 megs usually, but the machine's memory was only two. Almost everyone else's games had to fit their levels into whatever you're working memory was, like maybe a meg. ... I had been experimenting with this on Way of the Warrior, and I was pretty sure that you could basically get the stuff on and off the pages [on] the CD into memory in time for them to be in the background. What that meant is that Crash loaded three 64K chunks — typically when you're playing the game it loaded three 64K chunks a second off the disc from various locations all over the disc. ... So you could hear the [disc reader] go "ee-eee-ee-ee-ee," if you'd listen to the machine as it's going and picking up these chunks of data constantly. ... [I] I think it was Kelly Flock, who was one of the heads of [Sony], was like, "You're doing what with the CD?" He's like, "This is only rated for, like, 400,000 reads." I'm like, "Oh, that's kind of what we do if you were, like" — I calculated it out — "if you're playing for like three weeks." [laughs] Which isn't that long, you know?

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) Fortunately, they were very conservative in their estimate of the mean time between failure. I don't think there were any issues with CD-ROMs failing on the PlayStation 1, even though we pounded the crap out of the CD-ROM drive. ... The other thing that we did that was sort of cheating was, when we started — and there were many years where this was true, at least until '97 — the official line from Sony was, "You have to use these APIs to do graphics." So they would give you this C library to draw polygons and things like that and they said, "If you don't do that, you're going to be banned. We won't release your game." Sort of like what Apple does now — you're not allowed to use internal APIs or they won't let you release your app. The problem was that that introduced a massive layer of indirection which made things slow. ... We're like, "No. We're not going to do that; we don't care if they say you're not supposed to. We're just going to ignore that because it's stupid. It's just a dumb thing to do." So we didn't use their library and wrote our own assembly language code that essentially [did the same thing] as what their library was doing, just without having to be called from C and waste all this time with parameters pushed on the stack and popped off the stack, eliminating the memory usage. When they ran the game in their analyzer, they're like, "What the hell is going on here? We've never seen a game that looked anything like this in the analyzer. It's, like, using 99 percent of the graphics capabilities of the machine. Nothing does that. How is that even possible?" So that sort of freaked them out.

The music of Crash

Scoring Crash Bandicoot took multiple people at multiple companies. After Naughty Dog cancelled its port of Way of the Warrior, it assigned Dan Kollmorgen as Crash's sound engineer. Elsewhere, Naughty Dog contracted two musicians to compose the game's soundtrack.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I think they were just looking for something, or anything, that I could help with. They could tell that a port of Way Of the Warrior wasn't going to be a huge money maker, and they're like, "Man, we're going to need some help on Crash to get the thing done on time."

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) We also met with people to do the music. We worked with a guy named Josh Mancell and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame, and they had a company, maybe still have a company, called Mutato Muzika.

Josh Mancell

(contracted musician, Mutato Muzika) We were introduced to Naughty Dog by way of the Crash project itself. They were a relatively new development company with probably less than a dozen employees at that point.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) [Mothersbaugh] had this really cool studio on the Sunset Strip right across from where the Tower Records was. It was like this weird, lime green cylinder building and I'd go over there and work with Josh. ... It was really, really fun. I'm not a musician. I'm an avid listener. I can play guitar, but I'm certainly not a musician. But I've always been interested in it. So basically because I was the one who was sort of most interested in, certainly, art music like classical music, I basically nominated myself to work with Josh to produce the music because nobody else wanted to do it and had the background.

Josh Mancell

(contracted musician, Mutato Muzika) When I met Dave Baggett, it was clear that we shared similar tastes in music and sense of humor.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) Mostly, Josh would independently write. Josh did almost all the composition, Mark [Mothersbaugh] did some of the work on it and certainly provided oversight, but Josh really wrote the vast majority of the music for it. Mostly I would sort of provide advice or tweaks — not really terribly functionative stuff.

Josh Mancell

(contracted musician, Mutato Muzika) For each theme, I had access to either an artist's rendering of the level or character, a verbal description or a videotape of someone playing the level — or sometimes all three. This was very important in terms of creating each theme. After assessing the visual environment and gameplay intensity, I would build a percussion track that felt right tempo-wise. Then I would choose an instrument palette that I felt reflected the level.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) The initial tracks that we got from Mutato … they were really sort of manic, hyperactive, off the wall, zany kind of sounds — and that's not what we wanted. We ended up really gravitating toward, what we called at the time, an ambient sort of sound. Where it wasn't hyper. It wasn't melodic to the point where you're distracted by the music. … It doesn't occur to you that [music is] important, but actually it's so critically important. It has such an effect on your perception of the game. We wanted it to be artistic and not just little jingle melodies.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I think part of [the music's appeal] was just the sheer charm of the musical pieces that Mark and Josh came up with. They had personality, and I think they did a nice job of capturing the feeling that we were trying to get across in the artwork — it backed it up.

The sound of Crash

Like the music, the sound effects and voices of Crash Bandicoot required multiple hands on deck. Then it was just a matter of getting it all into the game.

Brendan O'Brien

(voice of Crash Bandicoot, Dr. Neo Cortex, others) I was doing some voices at HBO for Bakshi and Spawn when Joe Pearson suggested I call Jason Rubin because he was looking for a voice artist. ... So Jason faxed over some sketches of the characters, I went over to Universal studios, one of the great Hollywood studios — my parents had worked there in the "old days." It was a neat feeling to be there working on something different and new, whereas film had been the new kid on the block once.

Mike Gollom

(sound supervisor, Universal Studios) We would go up to their offices and they would play the game for us, or they would make video tapes that we would then put into our [systems], and we would watch the video and we would [create the game's sound effects] as if it were a linear program — but obviously it wasn't. So we would have to pull out those sounds and design them so that they could then be put into the game.

Brendan O'Brien

(voice of Crash Bandicoot, Dr. Neo Cortex, others) [We recorded at] the recording studio below the Alfred Hitchcock theater. More of a scoring stage where, you know, a lot of famous soundtracks were taped. ... It was intimate. I remember just me, Jason, Andy and the sound engineer being there.

Mike Gollom

(sound supervisor, Universal Studios) [There] were lots of other sounds that we did that were part voice, part sound effect. You know, when we were trying to figure out what Crash Bandicoot sounded like, you go through a bunch of different [options]. Is it really cartoony, or is it really Crashy, like, in a serious way? And ultimately after lots of bits and starts, you ended up with this combination of both where there's some classic cartoon sound effects that are in there and there's other areas where [the] classic cartoon sound effect might be combined with a Crashy kind of sound. ... We would use real sound effects that we would either take from a library or we would record our voice imitating a sound effect. And to get them in the game, because you know, at that time we were probably using — oh my gosh, what was it — 16-bit audio. The sounds were probably 24K; 48K would be at the best. But [Dave], to get them into the game, because there was a very, very small amount of memory left over for sound, he would just down-res the files. So they would be, you know, 8-bit files or 3-bit files, whatever they would be.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) Like the rest of the PlayStation, it was sized to be sufficient for what you might want to do, but it wasn't expansive by any means.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) One of the things that was tricky about that was, you might be familiar with the concept of a sample rate, like a CD is 44 kilohertz, so there's 44 samples per second. That uses a lot of space, though. So one of the things I had to do was take every single sound and every single composition and adjust its sample rate so that it was the smallest it could be and still sound good.

Mike Gollom

(sound supervisor, Universal Studios) That was, like, the primary consideration: How do you make a sound for this action that you see and have it convey the right emotion and everything else, the comedy, or whatever it might be, and have it be tiny? So we battled that continually.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) Basically I had kind of a semi-automated process that was the starting point that would generate all the samples that were chosen for a particular song. I would have it crank out all the different samples at different sample rates. Like, there would be a drum, or there would be a whistle or a flute or something, and some sounds were able to be played at a lower sample rate and still reproduce the original sound fairly accurately, and other ones would just get totally trashed — they'd lose all the high end.

Mike Gollom

(sound supervisor, Universal Studios) You're basically just making [the sound effect] as small as it can be while still being what it is. I know that might sound crazy, but, you know, a footstep that ends up being three frames long — a tiny little sound — and it's really just a "ckt" kind of thing, but how do you make that sound like a footstep on metal or a footstep on sand or a footstep on wood? And you would take these fractional little pieces of sound, but they would have to be just the right one. You would EQ them so that they sounded just right, because there wasn't going to be a lot of low end and [the editing and down-resing] ended up sounding really crunchy, so you take out a lot of the high end. It's an art to get it just right.

"You just didn't leave"

During the development of Crash Bandicoot, it wasn't uncommon for the team at Naughty Dog to work between 16- and 18-hour days, six days a week. According to the team, it was part of the culture, just what they did. Though, as some tell it, it wasn't without its repercussions.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) So I think if there was a culture, the culture was just being driven to do well and to work really, really hard. And I know if you ask the other teammates, the actual Naughty Dogs as opposed to people at Universal with more normal business hours ... that team was working 16-hour days. Every day. Andy didn't have a day out of the office, I remember, in '97. I had one day I was sick that year. Including holidays, you just didn't leave. We worked hard.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) [At] the time, my husband was working in film and so his schedule was about the same as mine, and we didn't have any kids yet, and also when you're young you don't feel it that much when you're working all those crazy hours. Now I kind of feel it when we do that. At the time, you know, that's what you do.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I think we were all willing to do it. Especially when you're young and you're working on something that you can tell is going to be big, you can delay gratification and say, "Alright. I'll have fun next month or next year." But it was definitely very difficult. It was definitely the longest hours I've ever worked.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) I didn't realize it until once we all had our pictures taken with a camera on an SGI. We were trying to do something for the website when Crash was coming out. We were just going to have, like, black and white pictures of all of us in a row, and we're all looking at the pictures, and we're like, "Holy shit, we look like crap." Charlotte had to Photoshop our eyes so we didn't have these black [circles] under our eyes.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) You know, when you keep doing that and you're trying to date and go out with girls and see the sun, it does take a toll. Everybody, I think, at some point had to decide, "How much longer am I doing this?" So the bonuses started helping out. We called them the golden handcuffs, because, as the profits kept coming in, Jason and Andy were able to offset the scars by giving us [bonuses].

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) [I remember] just getting pages and pages and pages of faxes. That was back when faxes were still a thing. Basically, Sony had 60 people in a room testing Crash all day for months and every day at the end of the day at [around] two in the morning you would get, like, 60 pages of faxes with bugs. And Andy and I would take the thing at two in the morning and started slogging through bugs. We probably went through 500 pages of bugs a week. You know, some of them weren't really bugs. Some of them [were due to a tester being confused] or something. But it would be like "OK. On level 17, Crash gets stuck in the weeds over on this part of the level and he can't get out." So we'd have to go and reproduce it and then figure out, "OK. What's wrong with the collision detection?" So there was that sort of death march of bug fixing that really hit Andy and me hard, particularly on the first [game].

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I'm surprised I didn't crash my car driving home some nights late at night after working all day and then playing an hour of Doom. I'm surprised I just didn't get into some alternate mindspace where I thought I was still in the game and I ran off the 101 going home. ... It was hard and it got really hard. It got very, very hard as we progressed along, working six days a week, working seven days a week, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in at the office. I think at that time I was 25 years old, and to not feel like you were part of society, a normal society, on some level, you know? All my friends would go out and have fun or go to parties and that kind of stuff — and when we got really deep into production, all of those things went away for all of us.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) Yeah, that was the tough culture, too. Anybody who came to the company [would say], "It's midnight and nobody's leaving. What the fuck?" You know?

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) When you work that many hours, and you work so consistently, the set of people you interact with is really limited — it's like only your team. So, both [Andy and I] had this feeling [when] we would go to the grocery store or something and just feel weird that there are other people around [laughs]. Like, you almost develop this sense of misanthropy, where you're not used to other people. It, like, has that much of an effect on your psychology to work that many hours.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) That was just Crash 1. Two was even worse! [Laughs] Three was pretty bad, too. For me, from August of '94 to December of '98 was one entire, giant crunch.

"I want a Big Ass Root Beer"

Because of the long hours, the Naughty Dog team members had a lot of time to get to know one another. They ate almost every meal together. They spent weekends together. They also, taking advantage of their office's location, got up to a lot of mischief on Universal's backlot.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) So we would go around the backlot on the Universal golf carts — that was part of the deal. You didn't have cars on the backlot. You just had the golf carts. So I remember [Justin] coming in and saying, "Hey guys, I figured it out!" There was a governor on the golf carts so you couldn't go too fast. You could go like 30 miles an hour, but not faster. And he comes in one day all excited: "I figured it out. The governor only works when you're going forward. It doesn't work when you're going in reverse. I managed to go, like, 70 miles an hour in reverse!" So picture him zooming by the ET ride at 70 miles an hour, backward on the golf cart down a hill.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Oh yeah, I think Jason flipped his. Or maybe I was with him when we did that. I think Jason and I, or maybe Jason, did. I don't remember.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I drove [the cart] backward. That was me. Because I thought that the brake was on the front wheel and I was going to try to pull the emergency brake on the cart while turning that wheel as fast as I could and get the cart to rotate around on its front wheels, kind of spin on its back wheels. And this cart, because every cart was different, happened to have [a] rear-wheel emergency brake, so I was going as fast as I could backward, pulled the emergency brake, which locked the rear-wheel and I basically ended up looking vertical, straight up into the air with the golf cart. That wasn't the worst, though. We lost a golf cart in the "Moses parts the Red Sea" ride because we tried to follow one of the tour busses through and didn't quite make it. The water hit, shorted the cart and they had to come with the tow truck and pull the cart out of the water.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We'd chase the tourist tram with our golf cart.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We were problems.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) There's a suite of offices [connected to] a long hallway and I remember Naughty Dog was at the very end of the hallway. The thing I remember about it most [laughs] was coming to work in the morning and everybody else was so quiet in their office and you would hear this loud music and sometimes yelling coming out of the very back office where Naughty Dog was. I think that's why they stuck them back there.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I remember this warring audio environment where Andy and Dave in their back room would have some kind of calming, soothing classical music playing, and then it would be like Henry Rollins playing out in the main bullpen area where I was.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I'd throw parties at my house. I lived in this big house in the Hollywood Hills — not a fancy house, but a big house with four other roommates, guys and girls — so we would have parties. Andy and Jason and Bob and everybody would show up at the parties. We'd go on ski trips together and there was a lot of me introducing everybody to my friends in town. We also hung out a lot with the Insomniac guys. The guys at Insomniac were just a couple offices next door to us. ... I actually introduced Ted [Price, CEO of Insomniac Games] to his wife, who he's still married to.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) We'd roll in at noon — we were all young; we were late sleepers — and we would work until 4 a.m., and we'd roll out at 4 a.m. together and we'd go to Jerry's Deli, which was down the street from Universal, and we would eat together, go home, sleep, come back in and we'd work again.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) [We] all knew what everyone else ordered and wanted to eat. I remember that a couple of us, Andy for one, always wanted to order, he called it the Big Ass Root Beer. "I want a Big Ass Root Beer," so it was this big thing of root beer in a styrofoam cup, probably a 32-ounce thing of root beer with crushed ice in it.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Yeah, and I think a few of us got that size in a chocolate shake a few times, too. The wonderful thing is that we were all starting to get a little big, a little on the chubby side, because all we did was just eat at work and we'd work 18 hours and we didn't really have much of a life, so I think a few of us started having pizza salads that Jerry's had, which is like pizza dough with a salad on top. We were like, "Oh my God. This is going to be the healthiest thing in the world," but we just ended up getting fatter. No one realized at the time that carbs could be so bad for you.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) I remember two years into it, I was thinking, "My social life is only this company. I gotta figure out more people to hang out with in LA."

Showing the game to the world

Sony officially unveiled Crash to the public at the 1996 E3. It put its new character directly across from Nintendo's upcoming 3D platformer, Super Mario 64. It was a time of excitement and validation for Naughty Dog, showing its game to not only the public for the first time, but also to one of the game industry's most prolific auteurs.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) It was intensely prideful [and] exciting. There was also apprehension about Mario 64. I feel like it was slightly eclipsing us unfairly [laughs].

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) I was frankly stunned by the gigantic Crash booth and environment at E3. I had no idea that Sony was taking the game so seriously and making it into such a major release.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) Well, it was awesome, because here we are working on our little secret for the longest time, and all [of a] sudden it's being embraced by the whole industry.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) [Twisted Metal] was supposed to be the front of [Sony's] booth for the 1996 E3. It would have been Twisted Metal, and they booted Twisted Metal to put Crash there, which they had just signed weeks before E3. And it was Crash, and right next to Crash, it was Mario. From that point on, it was legendary. There are photos online of Miyamoto playing Crash Bandicoot and that was, like, the moment, right?

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I was standing right behind him for the whole time. It was like an hour and a half as [he and Mark Cerny] were chatting in Japanese. ... Yeah, it was definitely a cool moment, because he was one of our icons.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) At that point it's just like, "Oh my God." It's like your childhood idol, right? The guy who's made Mario and all the games since then playing it and actually enjoying it. ... It's one of those pivotal moments of your life, like, "Wow. That's absolutely amazing."

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) And the set, it was incredible just walking into E3 for the first time, the first day of E3, and seeing the characters and the sets that were in our game just realized [on] this big set where they had put our kiosks.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) It was facing right across [from] Nintendo, glaring across at Nintendo. I've been in the game industry, I think, 24 years myself — 21 of those have been at Naughty Dog. There's not that many third-party companies at that time that would be able to get a big booth from a major publisher. We were pretty excited about that.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) Just watching people's first impression of it was so cool, because it was so visually different from anything anybody had seen before. And I don't think people really were able to put their finger on it, but I think in retrospect, the fact that it was really an organic environment was new. So it wasn't just 3D. It was 3D organic [environments]. People had seen lush, organic environments before, like Donkey Kong Country, but that was pre-rendered — so it's kinda 3D-ish. The art itself was 3D, but it was rendered flat. But this was really the first 3D, really, truly 3D, organic environment and seeing people's reaction to it was really fun. Because it was one of those things where there's a certain amount of disbelief and actually there was a lot of muttering from competitors that we heard about how it was faked.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) I think the first few times we showed it there were just these crowds of other programmers from other teams hanging around, trying to figure out how in the hell we were drawing so much.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) I think that a lot of people really, genuinely believed that it was fake and that it had been pre-rendered on a Silicon Graphics workstation and what people were playing was actually not really the game. That was pretty cool, too, because of course we knew, "Yeah. That's real PlayStation hardware." Because we wrote it, right?

"Can you tell me where Nintendo is?"

Sony, a new competitor at the time in the game industry, faced an uphill battle right out of the gate: How did it take on Sega and Nintendo, the undeniable heavyweights of the time? Sony marketing embraced its scrappy image and found its answer on the front door of its biggest competition.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Ami Blaire, who did our marketing, came up with the yelling at Nintendo. [She was] incredibly important.

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) I swear when I was looking at the demo, I think my mouth was open, saying, "Oh my God, I'm so excited and so honored to be part of this. I want this; this is my title." I think I would have killed the other product manager and [fought] her to the death if she, like, tried to take the title away from me. ... Essentially I was the marketing person who wrote and worked with the production team to create the marketing plan, the strategy, the positioning, essentially how to build that product into a franchise. ... We were working with TBWA\Chiat\Day, who was our ad agency, and the team of [Erik Moe and Chris Graves was] the team that first launched the Crash Bandicoot campaigns.

Erik Moe

(copywriter, TBWA\Chiat\Day) So [Graves] and I were working on Twisted Metal 2 and Crash Bandicoot and something else. I remember that Crash, the whole point was to challenge Mario and challenge Nintendo, who, you know, had a huge portion of the market at the time. They had this new game and they came to us and said, you know, "What can we do about this? We're this kind of challenger brand, and how do we take on this behemoth called Nintendo?" ... So Chris and I had this thought that maybe this game is so amazing that it inspires this crazed fan to make this outfit of his favorite character and drive up to Nintendo and sort of harass them and challenge Mario.

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) And that was the one rule that we had: We didn't want directly to insinuate that Crash Bandicoot was this character, because he [wasn't]. He didn't have a voice in the game. He was a fun-loving, kind of accidental hero, and we needed to be able to have a little fun with that.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) At first we thought it was a little weird, but it really was right. Because game Crash, he doesn't know about Mario. He's Crash, a bandicoot who's been zapped by Dr. Cortex. He lives on an island; he doesn't play Mario. To mix those gets too weird and gets too cheesy.

Erik Moe

(copywriter, TBWA\Chiat\Day) So we went up to Seattle, we shot a bunch of little 10- to 15-second pieces that were sort of like this crazed fan's journey to Nintendo, intended as teasers. So people would see this and people would see him on this road trip and wonder where he was going. For the 30 [second commercial] where he's in the parking lot, that would be, like, the big showdown moment. So that's what we did. We shot a few little teasers. I can't remember if that was the actual Nintendo parking lot or if we faked it, to tell you the truth. I don't recall.

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) [It] was the building next door. It was a Nintendo building, but it wasn't their main headquarters. ... But it also aligned with the fun of the campaign. This guy was so crazy, he would do pretty much anything and he kind of was a very spur of the moment kind of guy. So it would totally make sense that this guy hadn't had done his homework and [had] mistakenly gone to the wrong building.

Erik Moe

(copywriter, TBWA\Chiat\Day) It was, you know, "We're this outsider, we're this challenger and we, with this game, want to take on the big boys. How do we put the spirit of that into this campaign?"

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) Everything about our marketing to date was going up against a lot of tradition in the industry, right? Because there were lot of skeptical people that [felt] Sony didn't know how to do video games at the time and, you know, they touted several failures that Sony had experienced in its history.

Erik Moe

(copywriter, TBWA\Chiat\Day) But, to tell you the truth, it was positioned more like, "We want this game to be PlayStation's flag in the sand." So it was about Crash Bandicoot, but was also just about Sony being this new challenger, kick-ass company. Kind of all bound together.

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) [Sony] absolutely did not set out for Crash to be the mascot and/or to be the persona for PlayStation. It was nice because everything we had done when we launched PlayStation — from the Polygon Man and to "You are not ready," to all of that — was always a little bit edgier, and so the [direction] of the campaign that the team came up with for Crash Bandicoot certainly fit within the culture that we had created, but it wasn't intended to do that.

Erik Moe

(copywriter, TBWA\Chiat\Day) I think it gave Sony and that game a real cool attitude and a feeling that this is almost like a renegade, rebellious brand and game maker. You kind of just were intrigued by, like, "Who would do this?" No one had ever kind of done something, like, drive into a competitor's parking lot and shout at them with a megaphone [laughs]. "Who would do that?" I think it intrigued a lot of players at the time. ... I think, if memory serves, I think that we were supposed to go to all those places. Like, Nintendo was one stop, Sega was another and whoever else was big at the time. I think that that was part of it. But that started to get too expensive, so we pretended to go to Nintendo. But yeah, I think that that was part of it, like, they were taking on everybody.

Puking on the 101

Crash Bandicoot released for the PlayStation on September 9, 1996. It was a success and, after having its head down in development for two years, Naughty Dog celebrated — sometimes a little too hard, with team members over-drinking and embarrassing themselves in front of Universal executives, or going on spontaneous foreign adventures during press tours.

One such evening had Sony flying the small team out to New York City to celebrate Crash Bandicoot's release. Later that night, at 4 a.m., Rubin convinced a cab driver to barrel down 5th Avenue at a high speed.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I do [remember that]. Tera [Randall, communications manager at Oculus, where Rubin now works] is sitting here smiling because she's learning more about my youth than I probably ever wanted anyone at Facebook to know. But I got him over 100 miles an hour. We were young and dumb.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) It is quite amazing how empty those streets are at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) Actually, I'm a little bitter about how I ended up leaving Naughty Dog. Just because I was their junior programmer guy and I think they were hoping that I would turn out to be this awesome dream programmer stud. It was my first game job so I really didn't know that much about what I was doing, and Andy and Dave were too busy to really show me the ropes. I think they [had] already made travel arrangements for me to go to the launch party, but then they called me into the office and said, "We decided to let you go." And somebody else, I think, ended up going. ... So after all my crunching I didn't even get to go to the launch party. So I was a little bummed about that. I can understand the decision of "You're too junior. We need some senior guys to really bulk up the team so we're not killing ourselves working on Crash 2." But I felt a little deprived of the reward after the slog.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I remember going to the House of Blues in Los Angeles with some of the executives from Universal Interactive and everyone just kind of really cutting loose and having way too much to drink and then smoking cigars.

Sandy Climan

(executive vice president, Universal Studios) What we did is, we booked the Foundation Room and we basically had a private dinner for these guys, which [had] great food, great drinks and great ambiance and [was] sort of a great place to let down your hair.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I threw up out the window of the limousine on the way back on the 101.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Yeah, I was in that limo, too. Somehow I'm always in places where things happen at Naughty Dog.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) We got to go into the Foundation Room, which is like their VIP area. It was whatever you wanted to eat and drink and smoke. That was in the mid-'90s when cigars were making this sort of mini-renaissance and it was cool to smoke cigars. You combine all three of those things and that's what you get.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) That was Dan Aykroyd's personal cigar collection.

Charlotte Francis

(texture artist, Naughty Dog) Oh, was it? I didn't know that. I had never smoked a cigar before and I was kind of sick from it, so I don't think I would ever do it again.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) A good 30 to 40 percent of the Naughty Dogs [got sick] that night [laughs]. Jason and I not, though. ... I haven't been sick from alcohol since 1991.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) [Laughs] You're bringing up all our high points. We created what was the third most successful piece of content that year — I think that was Crash 2, at Universal. So the most valuable thing that they had on a return on investment was their theme park, the second was "Jurassic Park," the movie ...and the third was Crash Bandicoot. Sandy Climan had just started and he said, "Who are these people that created $100 million-plus of profit for Universal?" And someone said, "Oh, it's these eight dorks off in a chalet somewhere down the road here and you don't need to deal with them."

Sandy Climan

(executive vice president, Universal Studios) Now, the people who preceded me at Universal may have completely ignored these guys, and I have no idea, I suspect they may have. Because when I came in they were like an abused child and I sort of looked at it and said, "Wow! These guys are amazing and what they're doing with Sony is groundbreaking."

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) And he said, "No. Has anyone thanked them for creating well over $100 million of value?" I know the story from him. They said, "You don't have to do that, just leave it as it is." He said, "I'm taking these people out to dinner. I'm going to show them a night on the town, and I'm going to thank them." Great sentiment. What he didn't realize is nobody in that group had been out on the town, had had any alcohol or had done anything for the two years before that [while] we were working on Crash 1 and Crash 2. Taylor [and] I remember Greg Omi, who I haven't mentioned today, who had started at Crash 2, over-imbibed and the result is like you said. I would not say we were rock stars in partying. I would say that was the one day out of the office relief that a bunch of 20-year-olds had, and they took it a little farther. We were not invited to go out with Sandy Climan again after that. I met him many, many years later and he remembered vividly and said, "You know, I think that's the only time anyone's ever thrown up on me."

Sandy Climan

(executive vice president, Universal Studios) That I actually don't remember. If he does remember that, then you're free to print it, but all I know is I only have specifically good memories of that [laughs]. ... I'm sure it happened. I'm sure it happened. You know, it was one of those great evenings where you weren't on the lot. You weren't in their offices. You were somewhere [else]. These guys probably worked for relatively little money and they worked for the love of the craft. Now, they all became quite wealthy later on [laughs], but this was probably at that inceptive point where having a great evening out like that and feeling appreciated by Universal, it created an important evening for them. And yes, people tend to drink, and it's fine. I don't, but it's fine [laughs].

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) There were a few things like that. We had fun making the game, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't exactly party time. So, when we did get an opportunity to have fun, we kind of overdid it. That actually continued. I know all of the junkets that Andy and Jason did in Japan ended up with the minibar completely emptied, staying up until six in the morning every night. So that continued well beyond the development of the game and into the promotion of the game.

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) [When Jason and I] went to Europe for ECTS in '96, we were giving interviews from, like, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and then we were drinking until four in the morning, then we'd get, like, an hour of sleep, then repeat, like five nights running. After four or five nights of that, we had one free day and there were two girls [we met]. They had never been to Paris even though they were European, and we're like, "Let's just go to Paris!" And we got on the [train] and went to Paris. So then we spent this 24-hour day wandering around Paris, drinking. Got on the train in Paris, rode back all the way to London, then switched trains over to Heathrow, got on the plane, flew back. Jason and I landed at, like, 7 a.m. and then we went into work. That's just the way we were. And it was like that in Japan two months later in November. The Japanese press were impressed [that] we're sitting there hungover but still giving interviews. There was one morning where, as we were meeting the press in Sony's lobby, I was saying goodbye to a girl I picked up in Roppongi.

Retool it for the East, start on Crash 2

Despite being a success when the game released in September 1996, Naughty Dog wasn't completely off the hook. It still had the European and Japanese ports of Crash Bandicoot to finish developing. The latter required a lot of retooling to make the gameplay and character appealing to an Eastern audience.

After that, it was time to move on to Crash 2.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) But, actually [the post-release] was mixed for me. I don't remember feeling like a rock star, frankly. Because one of the things people forget is that when the first [game] came out, it was really met with mixed reviews. I think there was a lot of criticism of it because it was on rails and therefore was inferior to Mario 64 just in principle — that was one of the arguments. ... The other thing was, at least for me, Andy and I were working really hard even after the release on the Japanese port. Because they wanted changes made to the game for the Japanese market, and they were substantial changes. There were things that were quite different about the game in the Japanese version — it wasn't a simple localization — so Andy and I were working hard. When the artists had some time off, we didn't. So I don't remember thinking anything except for, "Oh, God, we've gotta do this Japanese version."

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) Sony Japan didn't immediately think that Crash would work because it was made by Americans and therefore it [would] fail in Japan.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) I believe that was the major issue at the time, was to make it feel like it was built by a Japanese team. I think for the first year of marketing in Japan, it wasn't disclosed to the public that Naughty Dog was a Western company. So we had a different marketing approach for Japan. The character was a lot cuter, a little softer.

Ami Blaire

(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA) I don't remember the Naughty Dog part, but there are some certain characteristics of a character that make for a successful character in Japan. So here in America, there are cartoon characters with only four fingers, for example. Well, you have to have five fingers in Japan. There's little subtle things like that that were important in order to ensure the appeal of that character for the Japanese market that goes against the grain of traditional animation here in the U.S. in particular.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) They wanted the character to look more, for lack of a better word, plasticine and stretchy, rubbery. So that required some art changes. But there were tons of changes to the fundamental game. I don't remember all of them. There were tuning things to make it easier. Interestingly, the easiest version was the Japanese one. The hardest one was the European one and the [American release] was sort of in the middle. ... I remember some specific changes that were kind of amusing. You know you're supposed to get all the boxes [in a level] and if you missed boxes then it counts them down by having them fall on Crash's head, and the word came back that the Japanese children who played it found this deeply disturbing. They were very upset by that. So we could just count them instead of having them land on his head and stuff like that. Another example was, there's a humorous death. You know, we have all the funny death animations. I think it was the one where he blows up and the only thing that comes down is like his eyeballs and his shoes. Apparently there had been some horrible serial killer incident or something in Japan that this reminded the Japanese of, so that had to come out. It was stuff like that. ... The other thing is it was totally different music. So I produced the music and Josh Mancell wrote all the music and I worked with him to get it into the game, and it was totally different music for the Japanese one. I don't remember everything that was different, but [there] was a lot of changes to the music. That was a big [change] because they didn't like the music that we had done for the American one; they thought it was too edgy or something. A lot of the feedback we got in general was, "It's just too edgy. We want to soften it a bit in a bunch of different ways." [After that] we immediately started working on Crash 2.

Taylor Kurosaki

(artist, Naughty Dog) I think that there was just too much pressure on us to deliver a sequel right away. Sony was counting on it, because it was a big hit, that they wanted another one right away. That was not something that I was ready to endure. ... I had been told for a long time that Crash 2 would be another two-year cycle and that it was going to come out, I guess that would have been [1998]. So I was coming up with this whole new control scheme for Crash. He was going to be able to do a lot more different moves and we were going to have the ability to hit a button and turn the camera around, like, the camera was going to be able to completely go 180 [degrees] and be on the other side of the level. These were some of the things I was really looking forward to for Crash Bandicoot 2, and I was looking forward to having that longer-than-one-year development cycle so that at least we could go back to a year of somewhat normal hours and normalcy and try to put our lives back together. I remember definitely sometime in '96, between trying to get the game released and the end of the [year], I was told Crash 2 was going to come out '97. It was going to come out the next year. Which gave us like nine months to make the game and so all of these new features were going to be shelved and basically we were all going to kind of right back where we left off on Crash 1. It was just going to be basically Crash 1 with some minor improvements and we're just going to be making more levels.

Who created Crash?

In the wake of Crash's release, contracted artists Joe Pearson and Charles Zembillas, as well as David Siller — who worked at Universal Interactive as a producer on the game — have claimed Naughty Dog has either diminished or discredited their respective work. As Pearson and Zembillas tell it, they believe they should get credit as the creators of Crash Bandicoot, claiming that Naughty Dog simply handled the back-end work like a production studio would on an animated film.

Meanwhile, Siller has taken credit for the much of the gameplay in Crash, posting numerous design sketches to his personal Twitter account and a now-removed Facebook group. He claims these designs led to some of the game's most integral mechanics. Many who worked at Naughty Dog disagree.

Siller declined multiple interview requests for this story. He claims to be writing a book about his side of the story.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) There were probably 100, but certainly dozens of people that were integral in the making of Crash Bandicoot. It is hard in a conversation like this, to mention all of them.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) Our first exposure of this happened in September of 1996, so it was 20 years ago. Actually, when was Crash? When did Crash come out? [Coincidentally, the day Polygon interviewed Zembillas was Sept. 9, 2016, the 20th anniversary of Crash's North American release.] Wow. How about that? It was 20 years ago, early in September, and I was working with Joe. He had his own studio by now and he was always doing things. He was animating projects in the Ukraine and Korea and stuff. By '96, he had a really nice operation going and I was producing a Christmas special for him and this was down in [Santa Monica, Calif.] and I was going down and we were working daily. We had a magazine ... I don't remember what it was, but [it had] the first article that came out about Crash Bandicoot. He was on the cover of this magazine. We started reading it. I think it was on the porch of his house or on the back steps of the studio, and we're reading this and we're just in shock. We were in shock, like, "What the hell is this?" You know? We came along to tweak the project? We came along to tweak the project? We created the whole thing from the ground up. It was astonishing. We were just astonished by it. I guess Joe confronted Jason about it, and I left a lengthy message with him on his voicemail just telling him how utterly uncool this was. And they blamed it on the press. They blamed it on the reporters. [They said,] "We can't control what reporters write."

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) The question always comes up: Do people believe that their input into the game is being recognized fairly? And for the vast majority of people, I think we've done a really good job of making them feel good and saying the right things. As you saw [in this interview] today with Charles and Joe, I continued to say that they were absolutely instrumental in making Crash Bandicoot. They have said that what they want to be called is the creators, and that, for me, pushes the line because they weren't there working the 16 hours all night. They weren't part of that core team. You want to call Bob a creator? Fine. Taylor? Absolutely. All of us, all of those people. But they were not the creators. In the same way that George Lucas was the creator of "Star Wars," but Ralph McQuarrie did a lot of the designs. [He was] an incredibly important part of "Star Wars," but not the creator. And so there's been a lack of comfort in the way that they're described that I would say is not a fair way of looking at things. And I maintain that, historically, I have been very good — as I did again today — mentioning the value of their contribution. We disagree on whether or not they should be the creators, and I'm sorry that we've never gotten to a point where we see eye to eye on that. I continue to take the high road and say they were incredibly important. They continue, it seems, not to feel that that's enough, and I'm sorry that they feel that way.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) To Jason's credit, he did call me at my animation studio and left a message saying he felt bad about what had happened and wanted to try and make things right. I never called him back and I should have. He did reach out to try to make amends and I should have taken him up on that. That's something I do regret. ... I was pissed off. But more than that, I was in production at a full-tilt animated series at my studio, at Epoch Animation. They were just beginning full production on a series called "Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys," and I had, like, 40 people working there and 200 people in Korea. We had a really good team of writers and producers. I kind of felt like, "Fuck it. Why do I want to waste my time with these guys? I got a nice thing going here," you know? "Goodbye and good luck." So I never called him back, but I should have.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) But, you know, taking a concept and turning it into a game is a huge, complicated process and they were involved in one part of that process — in the beginning. But there was also, and I think they don't really appreciate, necessarily, the rest of the process, because they didn't do it. Right? All of the technical challenges, all of the incredibly long hours of just making all the levels and all the [models], all the iterations we did and all that stuff. From a conceptual standpoint, one could look at it and say, "Well, that's just implementation details." But, to everyone who worked on the game, it's like, "No. That was, like, two years of our lives." That was really hard, and we did it with all of our passion and, I think, at a very high level of sophistication, and it was stuff that wasn't easy.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) They didn't create Crash is what it comes down to. They were the production company. We gave them the material and they put it in their pipeline. They didn't do it. The main creative force behind Crash Bandicoot was Joe Pearson, and the guy who worked out how the whole game would play out — all that kind of stuff was David Siller. Not that the guys at Naughty Dog didn't have any input; that's not the case.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) From what I remember, Jason wanted to make sure that the team was credited for the success of the game, and those guys wanted to make sure that they were included in development. I don't recall the details of it, but they were absolutely instrumental in making that game what it is. So, if there is any kind of discrediting, I think that that's incorrect. Those guys were a huge part of the spirit of what it was, so they did their part to create the concept art that the rest of us had to produce and make the game engine work correctly.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) David really came up with a lot of intricacies of the shtick that Crash goes through when he's going from level to level, and I don't think he's been given proper credit. Which is too bad. I mean, at the time I had no idea that he was generating all of those little thumbnails and concept drawings, but you can clearly see his stamp on the game if you look at them.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) I just remember the schematic drawings he was doing, where he was actually designing out the game. I don't really know exactly what he was doing beyond that, but if David says that, I wouldn't doubt it. From what I've seen, that's what I think he did.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) When it comes to Dave Siller, I do not feel comfortable saying that he was a large producer of value for the game. I can probably go through 100 names, some of which I've long forgotten, before I get to Dave. I could make an argument in the other direction, that he not only didn't help, but that there were issues. Dave did not work on Crash 2. Universal terminated his relationship. He can say whatever he wants to say, and I certainly will not spend a lot of time going point by point, but suffice it to say that I remember vividly the day that Dave walked out of our office when we had put in the rolling boulders with the square holes in the middle — again low poly — and he went back to his office. We had come up with it the night before [in] the middle of the night, like everything else because our hours were [the] middle of the night. He drew sketches of what we had done and then walked into the VP of Universal Interactive Studios, who was Mark Cerny's boss, and proclaimed that he had created them. That is not true. He still shows those documents and says, "Look, I created all of these things."

Andy Gavin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) [That's] what he spent most of his time doing, is drawing these paper sketches — I have a whole bunch of them scanned — of level designs and these diagrams of how a creature is supposed to work. But, in the case of Crash, 98 percent of those drawings were done after the fact, after someone else actually did the design and it was all programmed.

Jason Rubin

(co-founder, Naughty Dog) I'm not going to waste any more time than that. That is what that situation is filled with. So I kind of leave it there.

Dave Baggett

(programmer, Naughty Dog) He had a lot of suggestions [for the game]. I think most of his suggestions were not terribly actionable. They were divorced enough from the technological constraints or of the general constraints of realizing the concept that they were not very actionable. I could understand why he feels this way. But it's not really his version of things as far as I understand it. It doesn't strike me as terribly accurate or fair to the folks who really did the 100 hours a week work on realizing the game. So, I don't think there's a real story here. I know people want there to be a story, because it's exciting. But there was no sense of scandal in the making [of] the game. We basically just worked as a team and made this game. [There] wasn't really much to the story other than what you see in the finished product. As boring as that might be.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) More than Charles and I in many ways, David really [was] the seminal internal gameplay designer on Crash. I had no idea at the time — he didn't drag out his drawings and show them to me on site at Universal — but looking at the sheer amount of stuff he's posted online, I would have to say anything they did to Charles and I in terms of cutting us out of credit, they did to him in spades. You know? It's not a good thing. David, he has very strong emotional feelings about that. ... I'm frankly not all that emotional about getting cut out of the credit. I think Charles took it harder than I did, and David certainly did, and David had good reason to do it. As a professional, I just don't think that was a very particularly professional thing for them to do. Again, when Jason offered to make amends, I should have taken him up on it.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) David was speculating that it was because they wanted to sell the company, and a little while after that, that's when we found out they were purchased by Sony. And I said, "Well, that makes perfect sense now." You know, that's probably why. You know? That's probably why they did it. They just wanted to make themselves seem like they were self-sufficient, and they weren't.

Joe Pearson

(independent artist) You know, it's an old story, man. If you work in Hollywood or in the entertainment industry — or I guess the games industry — this kind of thing [happens] a fair amount. People feel like they need to grab as much credit for something as they can, even if it's at the expense of other creators that they work with, you know? This happens all the time. It shouldn't. You know, there's just some people that are fair-minded and there's some people that aren't. I don't know if it's insecurity or just ambition or what it is, but some people, when that kind of temptation or option is put in front of them, they'll take the low road. Which is too bad.

Charles Zembillas

(independent artist) At the core of it all ... it's just this disappointment that we all have. You know? We're all hurt. We're all, like, personally hurt. It's like being betrayed by a friend, that kind of thing. So it wasn't just this project that we were working on. It was something that we were all emotionally involved with to some degree. … It just feels like we've been betrayed by a friend. After a while it just gets to the point where I don't want to deal with it anymore. I just want to go on with my life. It's a bad memory. I have good things going now in my life and I don't want to look back. ... Speaking for myself: I would like the public to know that we were the creative source for it. I would like the public to know how absolutely involved we were from the inception of the project, at the very inception of the project. I want people to know we were working on that project before Naughty Dog had any employees, and I want people to know that we're very proud of what we did, and we're happy about its success. And that I personally don't hold any hard feelings. I don't hold hard feelings, buts it's a little tough. You know?

Crash's legacy and beyond

Naughty Dog developed four Crash games: Crash 1, 2, 3 and the kart racer Crash Team Racing, released in 1999. The Crash games built a reputation for Naughty Dog as a top developer in the game industry. Naughty Dog went on to release other critical and commercially successful series such as Jak & Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us.

Universal's publishing deal with Sony ended in 2000 with the release of party game Crash Bash, developed by Eurocom Entertainment. After that, Universal published six more Crash titles, bringing the series to other consoles and handhelds. Yet almost all Crash games released after Naughty Dog stopped working on the series received average to negative reviews from critics.

In 2006, publishing rights transitioned to Sierra Entertainment, owned at the time by Vivendi, which later merged with Activision. The last Crash game, released in 2010, was a mobile game called Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2. For six years, the character remained hidden from the public eye.

That was, however, until Sony's keynote speech at the 2016 E3 , where Shawn Layden, the chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, announced Crash would be coming as a playable character to Skylanders Imaginators and that the company had partnered with Activision to remake the original Naughty Dog games. Months later at the 2016 PlayStation Experience, the companies revealed official gameplay of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, a complete remake of Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot trilogy.

Dan Kollmorgen

(sound engineer, Naughty Dog) That's actually the first I've heard about it. That's really awesome. I still go back and play the Crash series on emulators, and I'd love to play them in high def and just have a more updated experience. Because, you know, in my mind it doesn't look so pixely, but with modern TVs you've got to up your game a little bit.

Bob Rafei

(artist, Naughty Dog) I've had a lot of co-workers in the industry tell me that when they saw [the original] game, they were like, "Oh, shit. We're screwed."

Brendan O'Brien

(voice of Crash Bandicoot, Dr. Neo Cortex, others) I was happy it was so popular; [it was] everywhere!

Mike Gollom

(sound supervisor, Universal Studios) It really, like, set the stage for so many people's careers. ... I can 100 percent say that had Crash Bandicoot not been part of my life, my whole career wouldn't have been the same as what it was.

Sandy Climan

(executive vice president, Universal Studios) They were, like, the crown jewel of what we were doing [at Universal Interactive]. ... I think [the remakes are] very smart. You know, Bobby Kotick [CEO of Activision Blizzard] is a great friend. ... I mean, those are the guys to do it. I think it's a great move.

Justin Monast

(IT, Naughty Dog) Pretty much, I think [my favorite part of that time is] the fact that we were doing something revolutionary and a lot of us had no idea how we were going to get there and what we're going to do. We all put our heads together and created something that is still talked about today. That's what I think about my tenure at Naughty Dog, that we created a console mascot — unofficial — for a large corporation at th