And just like Mario and Sonic have their kart racing games, Crash Team Racing was Naughty Dog’s 1998 take on the genre. Video game spinoffs have had a rather sketchy history, but one spinoff genre that’s always done well is kart racing. This is where Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled comes into picture.

After 2008’s Crash outing, Mind Over Mutant, received mixed reviews, the series was put on hold for nearly a decade.īut with a new audience having experienced Crash for the first time, Activision’s evidently seen money to be made. The N.Sane Trilogy brought attention back to this classic series. (Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t know since I was a year old when the first Crash game came out). Instead, it preserved the wonder of having played the original. It didn’t feel like playing an eighth-gen Crash game. The leap from fifth-gen to eighth-gen visuals was spectacular but what made the trilogy truly worthwhile was how it stuck doggedly to the original’s level design. Vicarious Visions, an Activision studio, brought these back to life for newer audiences with the exceptional Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy. The mainline Crash Bandicoot games were your typical late-90s platformers.

Before they became famous for bringing Indiana Jones’ Gen X grand-nephew to the smallish screen, our canine companions were better known for the Crash Bandicoot series, the closest Sony’s ever gotten to an iconic mainstream video game character your mum would know about. But look a bit further back into their history and you’d see why the name is apt. When you think about, Naughty Dog isn’t exactly the most appropriate name for a studio that’s brought us The Last of Us and the Uncharted series, perhaps the closest the genre’s come to the spectacle of blockbuster Hollywood movies.

Crash team racing ps1 cover