What You Don't Know: Crash Twinsanity

Crash’s post Naughty Dog career hasn’t been the best, but perhaps the rockiest moments in the bandicoot’s history was the development of 2004’s Crash Twinsanity. My name is Connor Ottem and This Is What You Don’t Know.

The game received decent reviews, but the game itself was rushed out the door basically half-finished. There’s a shocking amount of stuff that got cut during development that hint at a much larger, more ambitious game that we ultimately never got. This is even directly referenced in the game itself when Cortex mentions two dimensions that were cut from the game due to the developers running out of time.

For starters, one of the extras in the game features an Unseen Gallery, basically a graveyard of concepts that ultimately never made it into the game. These include cut enemies and lot of neat creature designs that may have been in the two cut dimensions Crash was originally supposed to travel to. There are also entire characters cut from the game, namely an evil version of Coco. Interestingly there is also a concept art of Crash wielding a sword. One wonders what the original idea behind a sword-wielding Crash was.

What’s interesting is that some of these cuts directly affect the game’s story line. There’s a scene in which one of the Evil Twins, Victor, mentions a vice-versa reversa device that’s destroying Crash’s dimension. We never do see what this machine is and it’s never brought up again; in fact, what the Evil Twins plan to do is never clearly explained outside this one line of dialogue. During development however, there was to be a level called Ocean Commotion in which the player goes to the bottom of the ocean to destroy the machine. Evidently the player would take control of the Mecha Bandicoot and rampage through the level, and there’s some speculation that there would have been an Evil Twins fight at the end. There even exists a fully-voiced deleted scene for this level. There were also two deleted levels involving the Twins’ refinery and an unspecified Ant level; not much is known beyond concept art but given the context these could have been important to the plot.

Another cut level involves Dr Cortex getting zapped into Coco’s brain and fighting his way back out, followed by Nina attempting to fix the damage Cortex did. According to the developers the level was cut late in the game due to being glitchy, further indicating how rushed the final product was. Interesting to note is that the band who made the game’s music, Spiralmouth, claims to have never seen the concept for the level nor did they ever make a song for it. There’s a similar cut level in which Crash and Cortex switch personalities upon entering the 10th dimension. The player would have controlled Evil Crash as he attempts to turn Cortex back to normal by smashing him into stuff. This segment also features a fully voiced deleted introductory scene.

There are also a multitude of vehicle levels that were cut. One such level pitted Crash against the Komodo Bros. in a race for the crystal much like the racing levels in the older games, and another featured Coco in a submarine. Possibly the most interesting level that didn’t make the cut was a canyon level in which the player would have taken control of Cortex’s hover-board for the first time in the series. Not much is known about any of these levels besides pieces of concept art though.

Crash Twinsanity is a good game, but it’s clear looking at the cut content that it could have been so much more. Now that Crash is back on the rise thanks to the N. Sane Trilogy, maybe we might a get a rebooted Twinsanity, and perhaps a complete version of the game at that.

#Gaming #WYDK