Darn you, Crash Bandicoot!
There is an adage about technology and how its technical and mechanical flaws during its prime are often looked back upon with fondness and reverence – and that they instead become beloved hallmarks. Static between television channels, the warm hisses and pops of vinyl, obvious reel changes in older films – without these things we might not so readily recall what era they came from in our mind’s eye, and we might even regard them less fondly in that retrospect. But what hallmarks color video games? What now charming, and at the time to creators and lookers on – crude and inelegant, vestiges of the era are uniquely (or not so uniquely) video games? We need look no further than everyone’s favorite millennial marsupial, Crash Bandicoot.
I think of the N. Sane Trilogy fondly for the most part, the controls are only ever so slightly different, jump depth in the original title (our primary concern here) is improved, and everything is streamlined, clean, and for the most part a faithful modern recreation. But what struck me as most odd were the cutscenes. The cutscenes, primarily the opening – are so different. What once felt like an exciting glance stolen from a dark, gritty, unethical experiment taking place on an uncharted Aztec island a lá The Island of Doctor Moreau (to this day never properly adapted) is now a shockingly glib bumper for the Animaniacs. Instead of Nitrous being played as Peter Lorre with just a dash of Dwight Frye he now can’t make it through a sentence without a string of guffaws while his eyes wall and he contorts to punctuate every word – now an impersonation of an impersonation of Dwight Frye (by Maurice La Marche who is otherwise lovely). Lex Lang does an admirable job in keeping Cortex somewhat grounded, but his physicality is just as frantic and abstract. And while Cortex was originally played completely straight – Lang has a very audible camp and exaggeration to his tone to match everything else. Cortex and Nitrous used to be so angular and menacing – and obviously that angularity was likely a point of frustration for Naughty Dog at the time – but that was about as good as it got at that time period. And whether purposeful or not, that angularity, that sharpness added itself to the menace of Cortex and the opening of Crash Bandicoot. Their movements weren’t exaggerated and cartoony, but reserved and simplistic to juxtapose Crash’s cartoony screen wipes and expressions – and this felt purposeful, not a ripple from budget or time constraints, but a purposeful decision.
And don’t misapprehend me, we are talking about Crash Bandicoot. The rad 90’s mascot character who launched a thousand shipped copies. But whereas in the 1996 version, Crash and his wacky attitude and design contrasts so well with Cortex, Nitrous, and his cabal of dangerous vortex experiments, in the N. Sane Trilogy, everyone is just as whacky and cartoonish as the next person. There’s not even a chance to see any modicum of subtlety (that might exist) in the tone or setting, it’s straight into a Loony Tunes version of the characters where they all move and emote like a failed Hanna-Barbera pilot. But where did this come from? Why did Vicarious decide that the original’s frank overall tone contrasted with Crash’s wackiness would be lost on modern players? Or was this perhaps a presumptious attempt on their part to ‘faithfully’ recreate what they believed to be Naughty Dog’s original vision, unmarred by the technology of the time? Each original entry does admittedly get more jocular with each sequel – could it have even been an attempt to make all three entries as tonally cohesive as possible? But even then, their vision of Crash Bandicoot is many times more spastic and kooky than Warped ever tried to be.
For as unique and interesting Crash Bandicoot’s setting and story are, it still attempts to take itself and its players seriously. There’s still an intentional gritty tension and fear with the art and sound design – Crash is unwillingly sentient now (more or less) and going on a Frankenstein-esque journey to confront his creator about why he made him and to stop him from making more like him. It’s a fun, wacky, platformer that obviously isn’t trying to illicit the biggest of epiphanies about the world and its microcosms, but its foundation still takes itself – and most importantly us, the players, seriously. There is a consistent shift in media today where it seems to only exist as a form of gormless escapism for people. It isn’t ‘that deep’, it NEVER was that deep, and it’s just a frivolous, unartistic, form of escape. Because of how ubiquitous games have become, there has been a push for art design and storytelling to be as basic and mass-appealing as possible. Sanitary. Unoffensive. Easy. And it seems to have taught people to think less about what they’re enjoying (if they’re even doing that) and if it doesn’t immediately elicit a burst of dopamine, that it isn’t worth engaging with. There’s also more than a dash of N. Sane Trilogy that feels like it was remade with ‘children’ in mind. Not targeted towards children mind you, but targeted towards parents who might be forcing nostalgia down the throats of their children. “See isn’t this good? Isn’t this funny? Didn’t things used to be great?”, all the while blissfully unaware of how different N. Sane Trilogy really is. Are we all so unable to take anything seriously that a mildly abstract premise like a Bandicoot running from a Mad Scientist has to have the same tone as a bad Saturday morning cartoon in order for it to be interesting?
Remasters tend to lose more than a little of the original in their pursuits of modern graphical fidelity. Like many 4K HD remasters of films, many hallmarks of bygone eras are ‘righted’ and revised to feel more modern and scrub away any ‘unseemly’ remnants from less technically advanced eras. But great care should always be taken with remasters to ensure that the original production is completely intact, lest the resulting item veer ever closer to being more of a ‘remake’ or ‘reimagining’. For N. Sane Trilogy to pride itself on being a faithful remaster that so drastically distorts the tone and scope of the original Crash, is more than a little concerning – especially when playing the original games themselves outside of owning a copy and a backwards compatible system is the only way to play the originals as of writing. It’s almost like a functional rewrite of history, aimed at ‘revitalizing’ profits for a long-disused mascot more than preserving art.
Interestingly, the ending of Crash Bandicoot is almost identical tonally in both versions. Castle Cortex is burning to the ground in the background as you face Cortex, Crash’s creator on top of a blimp, as he desperately reprograms his laser gun while astride a hovercraft in one last desperate attempt to eliminate him and salvage the chaos he’s wrought. There’s something so beautifully phantasmal about Crash Bandicoot and the world he’s in, something I’m somewhat relieved to say is fairly unmarred by N. Sane Trilogy’s obnoxious visual design in the end.