Previously unused animated cutscenes have been released for the original Crash Bandicoot game.
Original game producer David Siller recently posted the below footage to NeoGAF. According to Siller, the two sets of hand-drawn images from Universal Animation would have served as the opening and closing cutscenes to the first game.
The footage has surfaced several times prior to today, which had led to speculation on it being test footage for a pilot Crash Bandicoot Saturday morning cartoon or as potential ads for the original game. However, owing to David Siller’s position in the game’s development (and the way the second set of footage ends), his explanation seems by far the most likely.
Whilst Crash Bandicoot was still under Universal Interactive Studio’s control, they were planning to run these as the two cutscenes that book-ended the game proper. However, once licensed from Universal by Sony, the animated content was dropped. This was because Sony was heavily pushing for the use of 3D, polygonal graphics to modernise their games. This even led to a lot of stellar 2D titles not even making it out of Japanese territory because the graphics weren’t “bleeding edge” for their time.
You can find the cutscenes below:
