Sunday, May 12, 2013

Crash Bandicoot - Origin of N Tropy - Part 3

Here we go with the next installment of how Nefarious Tropy came into being. Drawings dated from January 22 1998. I continued with the idea of a time travelling device that would be worn on the body. Eventually this evolved into something that would encase the character. The direction was a good one but in the first sketch below it looked as if he were pregnant. 




6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The first one is so strange and so hilarious! The third one seems to be the closer one to the final design.

Unknown said...

As said before, wonderful designs Charles!

As Gabriele said, the third one is the closest one to the final design. The only things that are missing are the pistons on his shoulders (which are replaced by toning forks), the clock on his helmet and the cyborg/robotic arm.

Hey Charles, when developing CNK, did VV wanted to do a kart racing game from the start or did they had a different idea for a game like a platformer?

Also, CM has posted some CNK art (we already have on display all the Velo art) but here are some that are from another artist, his name is Perry Zombolas. He designed both the karts and characters:
http://www.crashmania.net/?menu=cnk&page=art&type=concepts_characters
http://www.crashmania.net/?menu=cnk&page=art&type=concepts_karts

Did Perry ever designed the other characters such as Crash or just new ones?

Charles Z said...

Thanks for the complimentary comments guys.

Pat - I heard the name of Perry Zombolas back then and was intrigued. It's very similar to my name and probably has a common origin. This is the first time I've seen his art as far as I can recall. He must have been working with VV on their side of things. He wasn't part of the development team that was assembled here. I don't know if he was involved in any other Crash games.

There's a large archive of art from CNK that I've saved. All the original art we created back in 2002. Some of what I did I've shown but there's much more still. Joe Pearson, John Nevarez, Alan Simmons, Snakebite Cortez, a lot of great talent worked on the game.

Unknown said...

Funny you should mention the name similarity, I actually thought you had a brother named Perry working on the game! The handwriting was too small then I realized it was spelled differently than yours.

Also Charles, if you're having trouble finding the N.Gin sketches, here are some of the final design sketches that were posted on the ND site long ago displaying his emotions:
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character_fichiers/ngin1.gif
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character_fichiers/ngin2.gif
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character_fichiers/ngin3.gif
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character_fichiers/ngin4.gif
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character_fichiers/ngin5.gif
http://www.crashmania.net/images/2/art/concepts/characters/Ngin.jpg

These are the gist of them but I'm plenty sure there's more. Dating back to what N.Gin could've been in design choice. In the art section of Crash 2 on ND's website, ND showed little to none of the rest of the characters like Tiny or Coco. Take a look for yourself:
http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c2-character.htm

Charles Z said...

It seems ND wanted fans to see as little as possible cuz there's a lot of Crash art they kept off the mainline as you can see from what I've been showing here.

Those are the N Gin drawings I did. That was about the extent of it. There's one more I found recently which I think is the initial concept sketch of him. It's a xerox copy.

Also there's some art of the Kimodo brothers. And there's lots of art with Crash and Coco together. I know I had development drawings of Crash and his jetpack but they're with the N Gin drawings I can't locate.

In any case there's still plenty of Crash art on the way.

Anonymous said...

In the old ND site there were some pics with Crash Coco Pura and Baby T togheter for Crash 3. Also the Baby T.rex is a little different in some colored sketches that were in the old ND site. Was there another concept artist for Crash 3?