The Canceled Crash Bandicoot Game That We Never Got To Play
The comeback of Sony's former platforming marsupial has been wonderful to watch.
Activision answered a lot of '90s heads' requests by remastering the first three Crash Bandicoot games. Then the publisher fulfilled another wish by freshening up the character's kart racer via Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. N. Sane Trilogy's huge sales ended up paving the way for a proper sequel (Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time) to Crash Bandicoot: Warped that's pure quality.
Witnessing the return of Crash in top form has been a long time coming. After original series developer Naughty Dog gave up the reigns to their orange buddy, his games dipped lower and lower in quality. While some of the Crash games published by Universal Interactive Studios, Vivendi Games, and Activision have some fans here and there, most gamers don't look back on them too fondly.
2004's Crash Twinsanity is one of the games that arrived during the post-Naughty Dog era of the platforming icon, but it turns out that a more ambitious take on the Crash formula was originally set to take the place of that series entry. At one point, the world was set to be treated to a game called Crash Bandicoot: Evolution.
Crash Bandicoot: Evolution was planned to be an ambitious mainline series entry with RPG mechanics
As mentioned beforehand, Crash Bandicoot: Evolution was originally prepped to be the title that gamers received instead of Crash Twinsanity.
Evolution was set to take on a more sci-fi feel for its storyline and stage exploration. The plot would have seen Crash attempting to foil the plans of the Evil Twins and the Ant Drones, who both wanted to take over the world. In order to save everyone once again, players would get to take Crash to various planets in an effort to save each one's inhabitants from his latest foes.
As for the gameplay mechanics, the levels were said to take on a larger scale that would give gamers even bigger environments to explore. And what's even crazier is that this cancelled game would have implemented RPG elements, and the story feel would have been uncharacteristically grim.
It turns out that Evolution got turned into Twinsanity in the middle of its development cycle. Evolution's theme was a bit too similar to the original Ratchet & Clank, which caused the developers to switch things up and go with the concept of Twinsanity instead.