Crash Bandicoot (character)
| Crash Bandicoot | |
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| Crash Bandicoot character | |
Crash as he appears in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot: Warped
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| First game | Crash Bandicoot (1996) |
| Created by | Naughty Dog |
| Designed by | Charles Zembillas |
| Voiced by (English) |
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| Voiced by (Japanese) |
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| Fictional profile | |
| Species | Eastern Barred Bandicoot |
| Affiliation | Wumpa Island, Australia |
Crash Bandicoot, or simply Crash, is the title character and primary protagonist of the Crash Bandicoot series. Introduced in the 1996 video game Crash Bandicoot, Crash is an eastern barred bandicoot who was genetically enhanced by the series' main antagonist Doctor Neo Cortex and soon escaped from Cortex's castle after a failed experiment in the "Cortex Vortex". Throughout the series, Crash acts as the opposition against Cortex and his schemes for world domination. While Crash has a number of offensive maneuvers at his disposal, his most distinctive technique is one in which he spins like a tornado at high speeds and knocks away almost anything that he strikes.
Crash was created by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, and was originally designed by Charles Zembillas. Crash was intended to be a mascot character for Sony to use to compete against Nintendo's Mario and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog. Before Crash was given his name (which stems from the visceral reaction to the character's destruction of boxes), he was referred to as "Willie the Wombat" for much of the duration of the first game's production. Crash has drawn comparisons to Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog by reviewers. His animations have been praised, and his voice has been criticized, while his redesign in the Radical Entertainment games has drawn mixed reactions.
One of the main reasons Naughty Dog chose to develop Crash Bandicoot (at the time jokingly codenamed "Sonic's Ass Game") for the Sony PlayStation was Sony's lack of an existing mascot character that could compete with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo's Mario. Naughty Dog desired to do what Sega and Warner Bros. did with the hedgehog (Sonic) and the Tasmanian devil (Taz) respectively and incorporate an animal that was "cute, real, and no one really knew about". The team purchased a field guide on Tasmanian mammals and selected the wombat, potoroo and bandicoot as options. Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin went with "Willie the Wombat" as a temporary name for the starring character of the game. The name was never meant to be final, due both to the name sounding "too dorky" and to the existence of a non-video game property of the same name. The character was effectively a bandicoot by October 1994, but was still referred to as "Willie the Wombat" because a final name had not been formulated yet. Wanting their mascot game to be multi-dimensional in character depth as well as gameplay, Gavin and Rubin chose not to base Willie around one attribute such as "fast" or "cute". The team felt that Willie should be "goofy and fun-loving, and never talk"; the character's muteness was based on the theory that voices for video game characters were always "lame, negative, and distracted from identification with them."
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