In 2009, to compliment Radical Entertainment’s reboot of the Crash Bandicoot franchise, High Impact Games (Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier) was brought on to make a new Crash Team Racing game, rebooting the 1999 classic. It was ultimately cancelled in 2010 after just 4–5 months of development, but 16 years later, an hour of unedited footage has surfaced online, giving us our best look at the project yet.
Crash Team Racing would eventually return under Beenox, and it was a hit, garnering an aggregate score of 90 percent on OpenCritic.
David Goodrich, who was the sole gameplay designer on the reboot, was streaming the fan-made Twisted Metal 5 game when he decided to pull up some footage of the cancelled Crash Team Racing project for suggestions on what the team could implement. At that moment, someone took a screenshot of the unlisted YouTube URL and, soon after, fans cracked the link, downloaded the video, archived and uploaded it to the internet, and then shared it with the community.
While he was disappointed, Goodrich took the leak in surprisingly good spirits. Almost immediately after, he gave an interview with Canadian Guy Eh on YouTube to shed some light on how the project came to be, including a bizarre pitch to Activision in the form of a David Attenborough-style Crash Bandicoot documentary.
“We did get a very interesting, well-made cinematic, which I think is what pitched this game to Activision, where it was a David Attenborough-style documentary about Crash and the troubles and tribulations he had surviving on the island and the predators he had to avoid, how he got food, and then obviously interacting with the ‘Bandicooties’ I think he called them,” Goodrich said.
“One of those images was actually the Land Shark concept-wise, and then, in this David Attenborough documentary they showed us, Crash is walking along the beach, and he’s kind of looking for debris and food and things like that, and he’s finding debris to actually build little gadgets and stuff – stuff that washed up on the shore because all the tech that he had in this game was basically Gilligan Island-style stuff: plant fiber and bamboo but then also, ‘Hey! A bottle washed up on the shore, and I can combine these two things to make a little gadget to help me in my adventures on the island.'”
And Over Here, We See A Wild Crash Bandicoot Taunting A Shark
In the cinematic, Crash walks along the beach and sees a shark fin sticking out of the water. Naturally, as Crash is wont to do, he sticks out his tongue (or taunts it in some other way – Goodrich wasn’t entirely sure), enraging it so much that it leaps from the water and begins flopping on the beach like a worm.
“He’s like, ‘Oh crap!’ and he’s running, and he climbs up a coconut tree and the shark even goes up halfway but can’t get all the way up, and then drops and eventually goes back in the ocean and just side-eyes him,” Goodrich explained. “It was a really cool looking video, and it was narrated by this guy with a British voice and everything. It was really funny.”
Canadian Guy Eh asked if Goodrich had a copy of the mockumentary that he could share with fans, but unfortunately, “he did not.”
At the time of this pitch, High Impact Games had just suffered layoffs and lost roughly 75 percent of the team after the tepid response to its Jak and Daxter PSP game, but the studio’s owner had contacts at Activision and was able to land the Crash Team Racing game as part of its shift away from handheld spin-offs to flagship console releases, which Goodrich cited as having saved his job due to his extensive car combat experience.
Unfortunately, however, Activision would soon cancel the game, and while the studio was able to muster a Phineas and Ferb tie-in for the Wii just a year later, it wouldn’t prove enough to save them from going under.
- Released
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October 19, 1999
- ESRB
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E For Everyone //
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Computer Entertainment
- Engine
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game engine
