In 2014, researchers at Australia’s Riversleigh World Heritage Area named an extinct Miocene marsupial Crash bandicoot. This episode traces how a character born during Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin’s 1994 drive from Boston to Los Angeles became the unofficial face of the PlayStation. We cover Naughty Dog’s deliberate strategy to fill Sony’s mascot void, the rejected Willie the Wombat, the choice of an obscure Eastern barred bandicoot, and the designs of cartoonists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson.

We explain why Naughty Dog built linear corridors while Super Mario 64 went open world, how the spin attack, Wumpa Fruit, Aku Aku masks, and TNT and nitro crates defined the original trilogy and Crash Team Racing, and why the studio walked away from a character it never owned. Then come the wilderness years of Twinsanity and Crash of the Titans, the 2017 N. Sane Trilogy’s 20 million sales, Crash Bandicoot 4, and the canceled Crash 5 with its Spyro crossover.

• How pre-rendered visuals and Donkey Kong Country inspired the push into playable 3D
• Why open-world camera control broke the tight platforming trust that made the originals work
• The corporate chain from Universal Interactive to Vivendi to Activision’s 2008 acquisition and 2010 layoffs at Radical Entertainment
• Why live service economics make a one-and-done AAA platformer a hard sell
• Crash as the first non-Japanese game to sell over 500,000 units in Japan, and the 2017 whoa meme