Okay, so here’s the thing about Crash Bandicoot. The guy who was behind the original programming, Andrew Gavin, has decided to speak out—quite a bit after the fact—about the N. Sane Trilogy. Let’s call it a vent session of sorts. It’s been, what, over eight years since the remaster hit the shelves? And Gavin’s not holding back on his thoughts. He praises the folks at Vicarious Visions a bit, just before pointing out how they “totally messed up” the jumping mechanics. Oh, man, those jumps…
Anyway, rewind to 2017. That’s when Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy dropped for the PS4, right? And later, it got ported to Xbox One, Switch, and PC the following year. These remasters were basically a spruce-up of the OG trio Naughty Dog had back in the late ’90s. People ate it up, critics too. Those updated visuals really knocked it out of the park. But Gavin—well, he was all smiles about how the game looked, but then took a detour into criticizing the gameplay.
Now let’s talk jumps, because Gavin sure did. In the originals, the jumping was something players controlled, kind of tailored to how long you hit that button for. But in the remaster? Every jump got jacked to max height, and Gavin’s basically like, “Whoa, that made them all awkwardly big and like, floaty.” Not the vibe he was going for, apparently.
So there’s this story about the PS1 controllers, how they were kind of limited. Binary analog input, I think it’s called? Anyway, Gavin had come up with this clever little system to calculate jump heights by timing how long players held the button, factoring in gravity and all that jazz. A pretty neat trick for its time. But apparently, Vicarious Visions missed the memo or thought it wasn’t worth keeping, and boom—all jumps go sky-high, all the time.
Sure, his comments probably feel a bit, I don’t know, outdated given how long ago the trilogy launched. Vicarious Visions has moved on and so has the franchise, for the most part. But we’re in this weird space where ’90s-platformers nostalgia is kind of having its big moment again. I mean, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD just came out and rocked the critics. There’s also this buzz—though maybe just dreams—about ressurecting Banjo-Kazooie. And Crash Bandicoot 5? Who even knows if that was ever a real thing or not, but it’s certainly a story making the rounds.
I guess it’s all cyclical, right? These games, they’re like… boomerangs, coming back around just when you think you’ve moved on.
