Character recognition: game developers take the popular character Crash Bandicoot back to its early roots.(Gaming)

ONE OF computer gaming's most endearing characters, the mischievous mutated wombat Crash Bandicoot has starred in a number of titles running on all the major gaming platforms, including the original Sony PlayStation and, more recently, Nintendo's GameBoy Advance. Highly recognizable with its exaggerated nose and large mouth, Crash's overall design, however, was slightly different in each title.

Aware that the character's appearance had been inconsistent since its 1996 debut on the PS1, Vicarious Visions (Troy, NY) decided to bring Crash back to its roots when it developed the seventh title in the franchise, Crash Nitro Kart. "Our idea was to explore the original vision for the character," says Karthik Bala, CEO and chief creative officer at Vicarious.

That vision developed in the mid-1990s, when designers Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson teamed with the newly formed Naughty Dog to bring Crash to life in the original game for Universal Interactive Studios, which still retains the Crash property rights. Enjoying the success reaped from Crash, Naughty Dog produced three subsequent titles for the PS1--though without Pearson, whom Zembillas credits for being largely responsible for the original look of the character--before focusing its attention on other subjects, including the now-popular Jak and Daxter. This opened the door for Traveler's Tales, which produced the fifth and six titles--including The Wrath of Cortex, the first Crash game for the PS2--but now without Zembillas onboard.

When Vicarious Visions was selected by Universal to create Nitro Kart, "we were looking at Crash and trying to decide where he needed to go from a design perspective," Bala says. "We had a lot of ideas and tracked down Charles and Joe for guidance."

According to Bala, both designers had created fabulous illustrations for Crash and the game worlds years before, but the final imagery had to be scaled down because the PS1 couldn't perform the required real-time rendering. Then, when Crash finally did migrate to the current consoles, the new developers faced the ...