Seeing the wave of Crash mania has been an absolute joy. Hardcore gamers having been looking forward to the game for months and former, more casual gamers rushed to pick the game up to reignite their nostalgic gaming passion. it made me think – Where to next for Crash?
Crash Team Racing
The most logical answer would be Crash Team Racing. It’s the best rated Crash Bandicoot game and one of the most highly regarded kart racers of all time. Some people even hold it above the Mario Kart franchise.
It’d sell well, but it’s also likely that it’d be quite hard to get the feel for the game right. It’d be a significant amount of work as obviously Activision has had to completely build Crash 1, 2 and Warped from the ground up, but it’d almost definitely pay off financially and critically.
Crash Bash
Crash Bash was also quite highly regarded but it belonged to a completely different era of games. It relies quite heavily on couch, co-op similar to the old Mario Party games. It was fun in its time but I don’t think that anyone is particularly craving it.
More Remastered Crash Platformers
There’s a whole world of Crash Bandicoot platforms beyond the original trilogy. Beginning with The Wrath of Cortex (which released on Xbox alongside PS2) as well as Twinsanity, Crash of the Titans and Mind Over Mutant. These were all competent platformers but they don’t hold the same mass-appeal that the original trilogy did. In saying that, is the success of the N. Sane Trilogy enough to get people to care about the rest of the platformers (most of which they didn’t play).
A Brand New Crash Game
I think that we’re at the point where a brand new Crash game would work now more than ever. Activision has just rebuilt the engine and the original trilogy clearly still stands up a lot more than people expected it to. The N. Sane Trilogy has proven that the original trilogy are in-fact timeless classics (even today) and don’t just rely on our nostalgia.
It’d be very interesting to see what a developer like Vicarious Vision (who are a fantastic developer) could do with a Crash Bandicoot game in this day and age. It’s obvious that not a lot could be changed or improved on with the N. Sane Trilogy, but surely they’re more than keen to take the learnings of platformers over the last twenty years and inject them into a brand new Crash Bandicoot game.
One thing is clear, we’ll be seeing more of Crash Bandicoot in the near future. What would you like to see happen to the series?
