Vicarious Visions is remastering the first three Crash Bandicoot games from Naughty Dog, and in an interview with Metro, Producer Kara Massie said the original developer was “very, very impressed” from what they played.
Asked if Vicarious Visions talked to Naughty Dog, Massie replied:
Personally, our dev team didn’t check in with them or anything. But through Sony, Naughty Dog has seen and played the games at a few different stages. And we’ve had feedback from them, and overwhelming it’s been positive. They’re very, very impressed, and quite touched, that we’re doing right by their original games.
As for how Vicarious Visions approached the remaster effort, Massie revealed that much of the code was unusable:
It is mostly that [reversing engineering it]. There was a lot of propriety code in a file format that we just couldn’t use. But we did start with geo data that – the analogy I use is it’s like a blueprint to a house – where you can at least see the scale and placement of objects in a level. And that was a really, really good place to start. And that really helped us with the metrics for Crash himself, so we could very careful tune his spins and attacks. But other than that there was nothing else we could use, so we’ve been creating it from scratch.
Elsewhere in the interview, Massie said we’ll have to “wait and see” if the hidden levels that never made it into the first game are in the remaster, the team working on Crash is separate from the one working on Destiny 2, and she can’t answer questions about a new Crash or a Crash Team Racing remaster.
“I can’t, but also these decisions aren’t made by me,” she explained. “So we’ll have to see how this game does first. But I’d love to work on another Crash game, this has been marvelous.”
Massie was also asked if the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a permanent PlayStation exclusive or just a timed one. She replied, “Right now I’m saying it’s released on June 30 on PS4 and PS4 Pro [laughs].”
