Saturday, February 02, 2013

Original cover design concept - Crash Bandicoot

Hey hey Crash fans! Look what I found! This is the original concept sketch I provided for Naughty Dog when they requested something for the cover of the very first Crash Bandicoot game! This was faxed to ND on January 19, 1996. Coincidentally that's the date I conducted the first class of my school two years later. I remember doing a color version of this too but I don't have a copy. At least there's this. Compare it to the actual cover of the first game and you can see how the idea was retained. Add the image to the growing archive of Crash art history.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic!

Unknown said...

Ah, what a fresh start to a new month! Love the cover design Charles! It really shows how Crash 1 was indeed a platforming mascot game by Crash popping out of the wall and showing how he has attitude. ND kept the ripping tear on the wall when they rendering this piece of art into 3D but instead of Crash jumping towards, he's running instead.

Say Charles, were there other designs of the Crash cover like prototypes that came before this one? Also, did you design the covers for Crash 2 and Warped as well?

Charles Z said...

This was the only concept for the cover design of the original Crash game that I did as far as I recall. I might have done different versions of the same idea. Not sure. If I did I haven't found the copies. Pretty sure this is the only direction. Don't know if ND had something going on their own. I never saw it or knew about it if that was the case. I didn't work on any subsequent cover after this. Just the first one.

Unknown said...

Oh I get it, it's still my favorite!

Hey Charles, did you design the Crash logos for the games too?

Charles Z said...

Nope. Don't know who created the logo but they did a pretty good job.

Anonymous said...

For what I know Jason Rubin likes to create fonts, maybe he created the logo and edited it for the japanese release.

Charles Z said...

Maybe that's the case. Maybe he created the logo or someone at ND. Best thing to do is ask him maybe you'll get the real story.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Andy Gavin in his blog have some informations about it. I'll check it out.