THE MAKING OF CRASH BANDICOOT FUSION & SPYRO FUSION

While a certain moustachioed plumber may have established the basic tenets of platforming in 3D, it was the handful of plucky heroes that followed who helped solidify the new genre’s staying power. Sony’s need to compete against Nintendo (and offer PlayStation owners an appropriate rival to Super Mario 64) spurred much invention and development ingenuity, until eventually Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot and Insomniac’s Spyro The Dragon were born out of a joint publishing deal with Universal Interactive. Both characters seemed purposely engineered to engage younger audiences, quickly garnering the status of PlayStation ‘mascot’ by offering up their own brand of colourful worlds to explore and jump through. They differed significantly from Mario, though, by touting a lot more attitude than what Nintendo would ever dare attempt.

Fast forward to the early Noughties, and the jump to a totally new console generation was seen by Universal as a good excuse to have Crash and Spyro go multi-platform. After all, both icons received celebrated trilogies on the original PlayStation. Surely they would be able to do it again elsewhere? In reality, the two unfortunately