As Leon Kennedy, we fled from a giant, mechanical statue. Eleven years later, we guided Nathan Drake and his brother, Sam, as they escaped from relentless pursuers on a motorbike. And recently, we helped forge a path through a literal wave of plague-infested rats for A Plague Tale’s Amicia. Three examples from literally hundreds of cinematic chase sequences in video games that can all trace their roots back to an unlikely source. The colourful cartoon platformer that started it all: Crash Bandicoot.
The running-towards-camera chase sequence is as popular now as it’s ever been, raising the cinematic tension in blockbuster games for the last 30 years. But its beginnings were humble, and its widespread use is all thanks to the Crash developers at Naughty Dog trying to solve a single problem: How do we show our character’s face more?
From a quick-fix solution to a triple-A staple, this is how an early Crash Bandicoot level inspired decades of cinematic level design.
Boulders is the fourth level in Crash Bandicoot, and takes the average player around 60 seconds to complete. Nestled amongst 31 other levels featuring lengthy side-scrolling gauntlets, tricky platforming, and painful difficulty spikes to overcome, it would be easy to assume that a quick, minute-long chase sequence wouldn’t be a particular highlight. But Boulders was the first of its kind. Any video game sequence where a character is chased towards the camera can trace its origins back to Crash Bandicoot. Perhaps the series it informed the most, though, was Naughty Dog’s own Uncharted series, which features multiple sequences of Nathan Drake running towards the camera across the entire series, as if it were a mandatory part of a Naughty Dog game’s DNA.
Uncharted makes no secret of this fact. Long after Crash’s creators had left the company, Naughty Dog still paid homage to Boulders in Uncharted 4, when Nathan Drake was able to pick up the pad himself and experience the level firsthand.
“It’s the modern Naughty Dog playing the antique Naughty Dog.” said Jason Rubin, a co-creator of Crash Bandicoot, in a 2019 interview with IGN. “What Nathan’s doesn’t understand is that this is basically the game that led to you. You exist because of this game!”
The level design for Boulders began its journey in 1994. Naughty Dog, then a small independent studio fresh off the modestly performing Way of the Warrior, was ready to take the next step. And the soon-to-launch Sony PlayStation gave it a platform to try something no one had done before: create the first great 3D platformer.
Super Mario 64 was still two years away and under lock and key, so the genre’s rules were yet to be established by the king of platformers. Crash creators and Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin saw an opportunity to stake their claim in the burgeoning genre. They immediately got to work, experimenting with how platforming could work in 3D, but they soon ran into an issue.
“We were trying to preserve all of the good elements of classic platform games,” explained Gavin in his 2016 blog post. “To maintain a solid control feel, we kept the camera relatively stable and oriented the control axis relative to the camera. This may seem obvious, but it wasn’t at the time, and many 3D games used different (and usually inferior) schemes.”
“What would it be really like to do a platformer in 3D?” Gavin later said in a 2020 interview with Ars Technica. “Imagine you’re going through loops like in Sonic the Hedgehog, or you’re jumping platforms or collecting stuff in 3D. The camera’s always behind you. All you do is see Sonic’s ass, but the front of the character is where the expression is.”
Locking the camera behind the character is now a tried-and-true method, used in almost all third-person action games today. But Gavin and Rubin were concerned this perspective would limit the character’s ability to connect with players – a thought that was particularly troubling considering the technical hurdles the team had overcome to bring Crash’s expressions to life.
“When Crash pulls his flat face out of the sand, shakes it off, looks confused, leaps up, looks at the camera and does his great big goofy smile… that sold Crash as a character,” explained Rubin. “No 2D game could afford the art, and no other 3D game had the facial animation that our system brought. And thus the main character transformed from an emotionless ‘vehicle’ to an emotive friend.”
The team at Naughty Dog knew their character was something special, and his ability to emote and react like a Looney Tunes cartoon separated them not only from the current competition, but eventually even Super Mario 64, the competition they didn’t even know they had. For this advantage to work, though, they needed to find more ways to get Crash’s face front and center.
“Our solution, which evolved over the next two years, was multi-fold,” shared Gavin in his blog post. “First, the character would start the game facing the screen. Second, we added 2D levels that guaranteed quality gameplay and a chance to see the character in a familiar pose, allowing comparison against old 2D games. And third, we would attempt the reverse of a Sonic ass level – the run INTO the screen.”
A desire to show more of Crash’s face led the developers to make their first breakthrough into cinematic territory and, ultimately, create the blueprint for Crash Bandicoot’s most iconic perspective. The angle switch, though, led to another issue. In the “Sonic’s ass” levels, players were always presented with the oncoming threat on the horizon. Despite the level of challenge, the linear path always gave players the intel they needed to progress – ensuring that any failure was the fault of the player’s ability, rather than the game design. When you stripped that intel away, you lost a core fundamental of the design. Players were now running into the unknown, so the obstacle path had to be light and forgiving. Much like other 3D games of the era, where open spaces became detrimental to conflict, Crash’s front-facing levels had, through necessity, been stripped of any challenge or drama.
“In 3D [platforming], you can just go to the right and avoid [enemies] entirely,” Gavin told Ars Technica. “You’ve added a whole dimension to the space, so now there’s too much empty space. It diluted the ratio between choice and conflict. We had to figure out how to compensate for this to maintain the action pace.”
“With all our technical and art successes, the game could not have succeeded without good gameplay,” shares Rubin. “This was by far the hardest part of making Crash Bandicoot.”
“We had this realisation that basically we had added a dimension, so the simplest strategy was to take out a dimension in some way,” said Gavin. “An example of that was the boulder level: the dimension we’re actually taking out there is time.”
The solution was to use time to dictate Crash’s running speed. To increase the tension, Crash could no longer leisurely navigate the path. Naughty Dog looked to cinema for inspiration, and settled on Indiana Jones’ iconic boulder escape as the device to help force the player into a time-pressured environment vital to maintaining the desired level of conflict
“All this became the legendary boulder levels,” said Gavin in his blog post. “Apeing that moment from Raiders of the Lost Ark when the giant stone ball starts rolling toward Indy.”
The combination of character and conflict gave birth to the Crash Bandicoot chase sequence. Its immediate success cemented the form as not only a Crash Bandicoot staple, but also the cinematic inspiration for both Naughty Dog titles and other developers’ action games for years to come.
But Boulders’ influence wasn’t limited to presentation. Crash Bandicoot arrived at the tail end of an era of punishing difficulty. In a time when arcade was king, most casual players couldn’t finish a game, and game design often targeted difficulty to drive revenue. A failed run led to another coin in the slot, after all. But despite making sure Crash had its fair share of difficulty, Rubin and Gavin also wanted to create an approachable game – one that challenged skilled players but accommodated beginners and, perhaps more importantly, children.
“We realised that if a novice player died a lot of times, we could give them an Aku Aku at the start of a round and they had a better chance to progress,” explained Rubin. “We also figured out that if you died a lot while running from the boulder, we could slow it down a little each time. If you died too much, a fruit crate would suddenly become a continue point. Eventually everyone succeeded at Crash.”
It’s in this approach that you can see how, alongside scripted cinematic sequences, Crash Bandicoot also helped introduce another major video game design philosophy. Adaptive difficulty had been experimented with before, but in 1996, alongside the launch of Resident Evil, the background act of monitoring a player’s performance and adapting the game’s challenges to accommodate really began to take shape. The medium began to move away from punishing players for quarters to creating a dynamic experience that could tailor itself to your skill level.
Crash Bandicoot was an overwhelming success on the PlayStation. The small team of developers managed to birth a PlayStation icon who’s still celebrated 30 years later, and laid the foundation for Naughty Dog to become the renowned, elite developer we know today.
“I think we sold under 100,000 copies of Way of the Warrior, shared Rubin. “We sold 9 million copies of Crash.”
“Crash Bandicoot was really the crucible in which the Naughty Dog philosophy was forged,” said Gavin. “We wanted to make a truly great game that was gonna be a classic, and to do that, we came to believe everything in it had to be great.”
Naughty Dog exists today because of the risks taken on Crash Bandicoot. Their desire to show off impressive 3D facial animations led to a reinvention of platforming perspective, inspired a generation of chase sequences, and, perhaps most importantly, sparked Naughty Dog’s cinematic ambitions.
Dale Driver
Associate Director, Video Programming
Dale Driver is an Associate Director of Video Programming at IGN, and once skipped revising for his exams so he could dedicate all his time to getting 120 stars in Mario 64. Be thoroughly bored by following him on Bluesky at @daledriver.bsky.social