Crash Bandicoot will turn 30 in 2026. Activision Blizzard celebrated by posting an AI-generated image of a hypothetical Crash spin-off that it doesn’t seem to have any interest in actually developing, unless you beg them. Crash deserves better than this. He always has. So why has he so rarely received his flowers?
Crashing Out
For a franchise this long-running and beloved, you might expect Crash to have claimed more classics. The series does boast four great platformers with the original trilogy and Crash 4, plus the well-liked kart racer, Crash Team Racing. Other than that, you’ve got a mid party game with Crash Bash and a bunch of sequels that no one remembers. The cameo in Uncharted 4 was pretty fun, too.
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Beyond that, the orange marsupial’s oversized sneakers haven’t left much of a footprint. After all, Activision Blizzard called the lega-sequel that came out in 2020 Crash Bandicoot 4 despite there being four mainline games released between it and 1998’s Warped.
It has me thinking about what other iconic series have managed to accomplish in their first 28 years. The first Zelda game came out in 1986, which means the series reached our admittedly arbitrary milestone in 2014. In that time, Nintendo gave us the iconic original, an undisputed classic with A Link to the Past. The N64 got a genre redefining masterpiece in Ocarina of Time and a dark, experimental switch-up with Majora’s Mask. One generation later, we were playing two wildly different, but similarly beloved GameCube outings with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. And over the years there have been multiple great handheld entries with Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Minish Cap, and (the underrated) Spirit Tracks. And right at the cutoff, there was a fantastic lega-sequel that iterated on the undisputed classic with A Link Between Worlds.
Sure, that’s Nintendo, arguably the best game maker in the world. And, yeah, that’s Zelda, the most consistently acclaimed series in history. Fine, it’s an unfair comparison. Let’s instead consider a series with a much rockier history.
Considering Another Animal Mascot
Sonic the Hedgehog turned 28 in 2019. In that time, we got an initial string of great games — Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic CD, Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles. After that, the series transitioned to 3D for a pair of entries (Sonic Adventure 1 and 2) that haven’t aged especially well, but which were beloved at the time and have only grown more iconic in the intervening decades. Add in the solid Game Boy Advance games, two well-liked DS side scrollers, the pretty good Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, and the beloved return-to-form of Sonic Mania.
I also have a soft spot in my heart for Sonic Heroes.
Sonic is thought of as having a checkered release history — and there were a lot of bad games released in that time frame — but that’s quite a few well-liked games. About 15 by my count. So why has Crash only managed four?
The Unique Factors Working Against Crash
There are a few differences. For one, Nintendo has held onto Zelda for its entire life and Sega has done the same with Sonic. That isn’t the case with Crash, who has changed hands repeatedly since his glory days on the PS1. Whereas Nintendo and Sega have maintained internal teams that primarily focus on developing new games in their respective series — Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma has worked on the series since Ocarina — Naughty Dog only developed four Crash games before moving on to bigger and better things. That left other teams filling in and, well, they weren’t Naughty Dog.
Secondly, Crash Bandicoot was always going to be a difficult series to iterate on. The three original games established a very specific formula and, when 4 brought the series back to critical acclaim, it stuck to it. There have to be sections where you run away from the camera and sections where you run toward the camera, and there need to be side scrolling sections. If you only do one of the three, it’s not Crash. If you have full control of the camera, that’s not really Crash, either. Naughty Dog quickly embraced putting the camera in the player’s control with Jak & Daxter and Uncharted, but Crash had established a more rigid paradigm. It’s tough to take Crash into the more open setting that other 3D platformers embraced without losing its Crash-ness. This is a series where you run in straight lines.
And let’s not forget that Activision has owned the series since it merged with Vivendi (previously Universal Interactive) 17 years ago. As I’ve complained on many occasions, Activision just doesn’t care much about games like this, preferring cash cows like Call of Duty and, since its 2008 merger with Blizzard, Diablo. Crash isn’t a game that can be played forever. It’s a simple platformer and the games benefit from having set endpoints.
All of that leaves Crash with an uphill battle to fight and not a lot of hits. I hope that Activision Blizzard gets serious and puts a talented team on Crash 5. Until then, Crash will be an iconic character who just doesn’t have the games to back up his status.
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