Meet Crash Bandicoot. You know him, of course; he?s the anthropomorphic marsupial that hailed from Naughty Dog in ?96 who would, through time, go on to become one of the foremost gaming mascots of the PlayStation ecosystem. Not bad for a character that used to go by the name Willy the Wombat.
Now that we?ve commemorated the anniversary of PlayStation One, for our latest episode of This Day in PlayStation History, our attention shifts from hardware to software, for September 9 is also a day that will go down in Sony?s history books as the moment when Naughty Dog unleashed its spritely bandicoot with the release of Crash Bandicoot in ?96. And not a moment too soon.
Sonic?s Ass Game
When Sony?s PSOne hit store shelves in 1995 with its CD-based architecture, the Japanese giant faced strong competition from both SEGA and Nintendo, who had established bona fide icons in Sonic and Mario, respectively, at a time when 3D platformers were still all the rage. PlayStation was in need of a poster child, then. What it got in return was three cracking exclusives from Naughty Dog, and a wacky kart racer spinoff to boot. Indeed by October of ?98, the prestigious studio had rolled out three entires into the Crash series in only two years. Such an accelerated production cycle ensured that not only were early PlayStation owners spoiled for choice when it came to platforming action, it also meant that Crash Bandicoot was all but a household name by the time Crash Team Racing made a beeline for...