Crash Team Racing (1999) Designer, Daniel Arey, has revealed that Naughty Dog made the original game because it wanted to do something new and fresh after three Crash games but Sony was insisting on one more. Both parties found a middle ground, with Naughty Dog opting to make a racing game instead of a platformer, and Sony getting more of its “de facto mascot.”
Speaking to Games Radar, Arey revealed:
We had done three Crash games and Crash Warped had been a really, really intense nine-month project. We were in meetings as Warped was finishing up, thinking about what our next project was going to be. And we came to this idea that we didn’t want to do a fourth Crash, because the team had done so much of that. We wanted to do something fresh, but we loved the universe and we loved the characters. And, of course, Sony was pushing for one more Crash.
The Warped camera system was sort of locked in place and it had a pre-calculated number of polygons. But we thought we were getting to a point where we could actually do something 3D that didn’t require pre-calculations, so you could move the camera around a lot more latterly. We had all these 3D art assets, we had a rich set of characters and a rich universe. We had so many cool locations that could make the perfect racing universe. We were also playing lots of Mario Kart. So we were like: ‘Can we do this? It might be a little different, a change of pace for the team.’
Crash Team Racing ended up being a success, selling nearly two million units in the United States alone. A remastered version was released last week for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
[Source: Games Radar]
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