While the game may not look it today, when Crash Bandicoot was released in 1996 it was considered a technical marvel that genuinely baffled industry experts, many of whom couldn’t understand how the game even worked. As an idea of just how impressive the game was, even fucking Sony needed help understanding what was going on.
To explain, although Crash Bandicoot looks like shit today compared to modern games, back in the 1990’s it was seen as cutting edge shit to such an extent many professional reviewers seeing early builds of it assumed the game was fake.
As it turns out though the game was just being made by god-tier computer buffs who knew exactly how much they could push the Playstation’s hardware before it shit the bed. For example, due to the way the first Crash game was made there was a hard limit on the amount of polygons that could appear on screen at any one time. Now according to one of the lead creative forces behind the game, this number was exactly 800, which was nowhere near enough to fit all the cool shit they wanted into the game.
Unwilling to make the game any smaller, the team behind Crash Bandicoot came up with a fairly ingenious solution in the form of random shrubs and rocks that would hide specific parts of of the environment from view when someone pointed out that if the polygons weren’t visible, they didn’t count towards the total count. Other sneaky things done to maximise the polygon count included perhaps the game’s most memorable destructible. Crates. Which some large-penised hero realised would take up almost no space because of how simple they were.
The team behind Crash utilised dozens of similar tricks to push the Playstation’s hardware to its theoretical limit, much to the surprise of Sony who reportedly couldn’t believe how much a game about a jort-wearing Australian marsupial taxed their flagship product. In fact, when Sony first booted up a copy of Crash they were astounded to see that the game forced the Playstation to constantly read from the disk at a rate of about 300 kilobytes a second.
The sheer amount of data a Playstation was forced to read when running Crash made Sony incredibly nervous, especially when someone calculated that the estimated lifetime of the disk-reading laser inside the console would be a mere three weeks if it was running the game. Crash was that fucking intense.
Thankfully, this calculation ended up being wrong, but it was still apparently a worry internally at Sony that the game would literally kill the company by, and we quote, “melting” everyone’s Playstation.
The game didn’t end up doing that because the people making Crash knew what the fuck they were doing but it’s still kinda hilarious to think the entire Playstation brand could have been sunk by this guy.
