Thursday, August 15, 2013

Tiny Tiger as Gladiator - Crash 3

By request I've dug up some obscure concept design work featuring Tiny Tiger from the Crash Bandicoot franchise. In this case the character was portrayed as a Roman gladiator. These development drawings are dated March 26 1998 and were created at Naughty Dog's facilities at the Universal Studio lot. These are photocopies of the original art. That's why some of the images are cut off slightly. I don't know if they've been published before. If not then this is the first time they've been shown.

Tiny Tiger was conceived for the first Crash game by Joe Pearson. he was primarily responsible for the design. I did my best to make the character look his best and work as something that would be animated. Tiny was originally called The Tasmanian Tiger but his name was changed later on. 




8 comments:

David said...

Great drawing Charles! They're tecnhicly and detaily well made! Keep showing us more Crash stuff like these drwaing of Tiny...

Matt said...

If you play the NTSC American version of Crash Bandicoot 2 and pause the game on the Tiny Tiger boss battle, his name says "Taz Tiger" when it should obviously say "Tiny Tiger".

Anonymous said...

The first two were in the original ND Crash B. site, but the other two are totally new and absolutely amazing!
What was the purpose of the net? It wasn't shown in the game...

Charles Z said...

Thank you David. Whatever Crash art I can find I'll follow up with here.

Matt - That's interesting. The original "Taz" name got through someway.

Gabriele - The net was part of that particular gladiator getup. The trident and netting were used together in the arena. My guess is that it was too complex to deal with so they didn't put it in the game.

Unknown said...

can you show us the concept art about tiny tiger's origins?

Charles Z said...

Hi Charlie.

There really wasn't much concept art involving the original development of Tiny Tiger. Joe Pearson did a quick concept sketch and Naughty Dog went with it. I fixed it up and defined the character more and that was that. Whatever I can find I'll post up at some point soon.

Unknown said...

Hello Charles, big fan of your work (specially for the Crash Franchise), besides this ones did you did more for Tiny? Also how much were you involve in CTR (besides doing concept for Oxide), were you given the task tondraw eaxh characters in their karts?

Charles Z said...

Hello there Unknown! Thank you for being a fan of my work. I didn't do much development on Tiny. Joe Pearson nailed the character's look at the beginning and I went along with what he did as Naughty Dog was happy with it. I wasn't involved with CTR. The 4 games I worked on were Crash 1, 2 and 3. After that I did Jak and Daxter and that was the last project I developed for Naughty Dog. Afterwards I worked on Crash Nitro Kart for Vicarious Visions and that wrapped up my participation with Crash.