MINIGAME MADNESS
THERE ARE DOZENS OF CREATIVE CHALLENGES TO KEEP THINGS FRESH
the Wumpa Fruits needed to unlock more levels while spinning and jumping to defeat enemies. “Because our characters were sprites,” Jonny remembers, “we could reuse a lot of the sprite animations. On the art side, I know our artists pushed for greater fidelity in backgrounds from the previous games.” Spyro eventually handled much the same as the manic marsupial outside of minigames. He was now controllable from a side view though still equipped with recognisable skills like fire breathing and his trademark air glide.
The next major challenge was to make the dozens of minigames featured in Crash Bandicoot Fusion and Spyro Fusion fun and engaging. Again, Crash Bandicoot had a bit of a leg up in this department, largely because those early Playstation games of his offered a good mix of gameplay styles.
For instance, one level might see him barrelling down a track on a motorcycle, while another may task players to guide him underwater in scuba gear while avoiding bombs. Spyro The Dragon, meanwhile, needed the most retooling out of the two once more.
“On Crash [Fusion], we used previous Crash games to mine for ideas and tried to mash that up with Spyro characters to get inspiration,” says Jonny. “We had a series of forced-scrolling levels where we tried to use familiar previous Crash elements such as polar bear riding or using a jetpack.” Forced-scrolling levels, Jonny tells us, had been a particular favourite style of his since Battletoads. “Other minigames were based on games from Crash Bash, such as Ballistix, and a tank minigame that was also inspired by Atari’s Combat. The Sheep Stampede minigames were inspired by Tapper, but instead of serving drinks, Crash was shooting his Fruit Bazooka at sheep.”
Vicarious Visions soon realised that, as well as paying tribute to the world and characters of each eponymous mascot, the minigame collection format was also just a good excuse to celebrate wider gaming history. Contemporary players might not be aware that they were playing a warped version of Breakout whenever Crash or Spyro bounce metal balls back at their enemies in the likes of Blizzard Ball, but it didn’t matter. Providing Crash still collected fruit and Spyro hoovered up gems while surrounded by familiar friends, everything in between just needed to be fun within a bite-sized format, as each selfcontained minigame was constructed to offer short bursts of play suited to the handheld format.
All told, outside of the initial design challenges with Spyro, it wasn’t
“MULTIPLAYER HAD A MUCH LARGER BARRIER TO ENTRY BACK THEN” JONNY RUSSELL
too tricky for Jonny and his team to incorporate key franchise elements into each minigame or the handful of hub worlds. “We did our best to combine familiar characters and settings from both games,” he says. “In some cases, it was natural, like adding the sheep (a familiar Spyro element) as characters that could be fodder. Since crossovers always have a misunderstanding between the heroes, we had the cheesy idea of the enemies wearing masks of our heroes to help facilitate this miscommunication. We also used characters from each game franchise in the same way to help link the two worlds, such as Moneybags from Spyro, who ran a shop in both games.”
Scene setting aside, publisher Vivendi knew that it needed another major hook to help inspire players to link up with friends who had got the opposite game. Crash Fusion and Spyro Fusion may have never intended to replicate the creature collection madness found in Pokémon, but both games did play into the idea of trading by way of including collectible cards exclusive to either game. These cards were earned either through scoring well in challenges or buying them from the in-game shop, ranging in rarity from low to high depending on the character they depicted. Players could trade back and forth with one another via the GBA link cable, which Vicarious Visions implemented to try and achieve that same ‘collect them all’ mentality.
Outside of each game’s main story mode, also encouraging players to link up was the suite of reformatted Party Mode minigames. “For multiplayer, we based games on mechanics and modes in the minigames, such as the bridge fight and Ballistix, which had a variety of different modes and could be four players,” says Jonny. He admits, though, that a lot was asked of players to set up this joint fun. “Multiplayer had a much larger barrier to entry back then, since not only did you need a friend with a GBA and two carts, you had to have a link cable in order to play. I believe we did have a stripped-down version of multiplayer where you only needed one cart though.”
Ultimately, Crash Bandicoot Fusion and Spyro Fusion received mixed reviews upon release, with select critics noticing the slightly higher attention to detail paid towards the former – unsurprising considering that the ambitious crossover project originally started out as another Crash Bandicoot game. Nevertheless, it was hard to deny the thrill of seeing these two Nineties icons rub shoulders for the first, and pretty much only time in a full capacity (although both characters also have cameos in each other’s games).
If nothing else, both titles proved that Vicarious Visions had the chops to adopt multiple play styles and implant them into a single game, no doubt influencing its work on the wildly successful Skylanders series of toys-to-life games just under a decade later. Today, Crash and Spyro now find themselves under Activision’s stewardship, but does Jonny think they’ll ever cross paths again? “The two characters are still around and remembered today,” he says, “and I’m sure fans would welcome another crossover.”