Crash Team Racing

1999 · Racing · PlayStation

About Crash Team Racing

Crash Team Racing (1999) is Naughty Dog's last Crash Bandicoot game, a PlayStation kart racer whose power-slide boosts led critics to rank it alongside, or above, Mario Kart.

Crash Team Racing in Depth

Characters come in three types: large ones with slow acceleration and high top speed, balanced medium ones, and small ones with quick acceleration and sharp handling. The key technique is the power slide: holding a shoulder button to hop and steering before landing starts a slide, and pressing the opposite shoulder button when the Turbo Boost Meter turns red, as the exhaust turns black, gives a boost. Three boosts can be chained in one slide, the third the strongest, but waiting too long backfires and sliding too long spins the kart out. Hang time over jumps also earns boosts, and accelerating just before the start gives a head start. Question-mark crates hold weapons and boosts, and collecting ten Wumpa Fruit makes the kart faster and strengthens power-ups.

In Adventure mode the alien Nitros Oxide threatens to turn Earth into a concrete parking lot unless its best driver beats him. Winning trophies across a world's tracks opens a boss race for a key to the next, and side events award more: Relic Races against the clock with time-freezing crates, CTR Challenges to collect the letters C, T and R while winning, and Gem Cups. Arcade, Versus and Time Trial modes and a customisable four-player Battle mode round it out.

Making Crash Team Racing

Naughty Dog pitched the game to Sony, which made a publishing deal with Crash owner Universal Interactive; the engine was built while Crash Bandicoot: Warped was in production. A team of 16 to 18 made it in eight months on a $2.4 million budget, with characters designed by Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson, art direction by Bob Rafei and music by Josh Mancell of Mutato Muzika. The turbo system was meant to make it more involving than older kart games, and memory limits kept Oxide from being playable.

It was released in North America on 19 October 1999 and in Europe that December, promoted with a Crash-themed NASCAR car and a Pizza Hut demo disc. Critics called it the best kart racer on the PlayStation, and several, including EGM's reviewers, said it outshone Mario Kart for its controls, graphics and tracks, while noting how much it borrowed from Nintendo. It sold 1.9 million copies in the US and over 300,000 in Japan. Crash Nitro Kart followed in 2003, and Beenox remade it as Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled in 2019.

Crash Team Racing Trivia

It began as an original game with block-headed characters before Naughty Dog agreed to make it a Crash game.
The team rebuilt Diddy Kong Racing's Crescent Island course in a prototype to test whether a track that size was possible on the PlayStation.
To avoid drawing up to 64 tyres in four-player split screen, programmer Greg Omi rendered them as camera-facing 2D sprites.
Nitros Oxide was first planned as a mad scientist trying to speed up the world, an idea referenced in a Disney Adventures comic.
Polar and Pura were originally going to share one kart as a single character.