Following the recent successful return of popular 90’s platform icon Crash Bandicoot in the PS4 exclusive (for now hopefully) N.Sane Trilogy, Dark Horse comics editor Ian Tucker has revealed a 150 page, hardcover “bible” entitled The Crash Bandicoot Files: How Willy the Wombat Sparked Marsupial Mania. 

The Crash Files’ cover displays the original games’ logo alongside concept art from the character’s Looney Tunes inspired inception

The news came as part of a 50 minute Comic-con panel hosted by the almighty Geoff Keighley, centred around Crash Bandicoot in general and discussing both the origin of the character, the process of designing levels and achieving such technical benchmarks on the PlayStation architecture, and how Vicarious Visions were approached by Activision to work on a remaster following Sean Layden’s infamous fashion statement in 2015.

Sean Layden Turned heads for all the RIGHT reasons by donning this Crash shirt at PSX in 2015. On a serious note, where can I genuinely buy this shirt?

Tucker described the book during the panel as “a reproduction of the original Crash Bandicoot developer’s bible“, featuring production schedules, game scripts, level overviews and even things like the topography of each map (which incidentally is something I believe Vicarious incorporated into the N.Sane Trilogy, as they begun development with the original wire framing of every single level and built upon them). Pages will also include high resolution scans from original notes of the Naughty dog dev team, such as Texture artist Charlotte Francis who featured on the panel.

Storyboards shown at the panel whilst discussing the way the original game’s cinematics were re-imagined for the PS4 overhaul

During early animation tests for the remakes, John Paul Rhinemiller (Cinematics, Vicarious Visions) stated that “We referred to the bible all the time, because as developers we had that and we were flipping through it all the time. We tried to gather as much inspiration as we could from that bible and try to think what they were thinking about 20 years ago”. Clearly the book had some worth to developers and so will be a goldmine for those who are fans of the PlayStation classic.

The book will join the list of quite a few pieces of memorabilia Crash has received since his resurgence in June, including the consequently mentioned First4Figures 9″ PVC Statue, a beautiful effigy that will grace the desks and shrines of those willing to spend NINETY DOLLARS on a figure.

The Crash Bandicoot Files: How Willy the Wombat Sparked Marsupial Mania is set for release in March 2018

Source