The first Spyro The Dragon game is nearly three decades old, yet in the quarter century (and counting) since its release on the original PlayStation, there haven’t been many games that build on its specific approach to 3D platformer design. As I glide down memory lane with the Switch version of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, I’m reminded that Spyro’s level design is still unique all these years later.
The Quirks That Make Spyro Unique
There are a whole lot of games that come close. At first glance, it seems like Super Mario 64 and Astro Bot are doing similar things, giving you a hub world with many different portals, each of which transport you to a new playground. In Mario 64, the portals are the paintings hanging in Peach’s castle. In Astro Bot, the portals are the planets within the galaxies.
But Spyro’s approach is different for a few reasons. For one, its hub world is treated like an actual level, even though it primarily exists to funnel you to other places. In Mario 64, the stars are almost entirely contained within the paintings. There are stars that are accessed from the castle, but aside from three you get by finding and speaking to Toad, you have to leave the main castle area to get them. If you’re not reaching a new area through a painting, you’ll still need to hop through a window, find the hole in the bottom of a moat, or stare at the sun to travel to the sky.
In Astro Bot, the hub is a map of the planets that is entirely different, functionally, than its 3D levels. It is still open to exploration, but that exploration is top-down and done via a spaceship, not in third-person via a running, jumping avatar. You access new levels from space, but space doesn’t act as a level in itself, at least not in the way that Astro’s other levels do.
But in Spyro, collectibles you need to find are actually squirreled away in the hub area, which is designed with the kinds of platforming challenges you tend to expect only in a proper level. The result is that the hub feels like more than a waiting room in the ways Princess Peach’s castle or the galaxy in Astro Bot never do.
Finding The Entrance And The Exit
The levels are also different because you can find portals to sub-levels within them. While playing Spyro: Year of the Dragon recently, I was inside a level, poking around, when I found a portal to another level where I could switch over and play as Sheila the Kangaroo. The Spyro games do this fairly often. Just because you enter one area, that doesn’t mean the game isn’t going to take you deeper down the rabbit hole.
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The end of each level is also distinct. Instead of exiting by reaching the finish line, Spyro offers a doorway out once you finish one of many goals within the level. But, going in, you don’t know what that goal is or where the exit will be. You can always exit the stage from the menu, but if you want to do it the proper way, you need to explore and try stuff until you find it.
Part of the reason I love revisiting old games is that you get glimpses of evolutionary dead ends. We have games, like Astro Bot, that build heavily on the 3D Mario model. We have far fewer (if any) that build on these quirks in Spyro’s design. If Astro Bot’s success (and the general need for a resurgence of double-A games) leads to more 3D platformers being greenlit, I hope developers look to the less influential greats, not just the classics like Mario that have already set the template.
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