Video game creators are often honest about their properties, especially when it comes to the ones that they personally made and have a large stake in. They want to do their best for you because they want their games to shine and their talents to be recognized as well. Enter Andy Gavin, the co-creator of the beloved video game character Crash Bandicoot. Crash was one of the reasons that the PlayStation 1 took off like it did, and the character is still being used today, albeit in a much smaller way, and across multiple platforms. Regardless, Gavin made a post on LinkedIn that is going to turn some heads.
The reason for that is that Gavin made a long post about the remake trilogy that was done for Crash Bandicoot a long while back. It was a hit thing, and he admitted that he was good…for the most part. He wasn’t afraid to talk about what he didn’t like, though:
“In my opinion (key word, opinion!), the Crash Bandicoot remake got almost everything right. Except the most important 30 milliseconds. When they remade Crash, they nailed the visuals. Looked great, faithful to the original, and kept the spirit. Then they completely botched how jumping works.”
How so? The reason is that when Gavin and his crew worked on the original title, they did something “insane” and made it so that the button responses would dictate how far you jumped and how high you got in your jump:
“So we built something borderline insane. The game would detect when you pressed jump, start the animation, then continuously measure how long you held the button. As Crash rose through the air, we’d subtly adjust gravity, duration, and force based on your input.
Let go early = smaller hop. Hold it down = maximum height. But it wasn’t binary – I interpreted your intent across those 30-60 milliseconds and translated it into analog control using digital inputs.”
Gavin then stated that the remake team, for all the good work they did, didn’t do this with their jumps. Instead, they made every jump “maximum height,” and that ruined things, including the “small hops” that you had to make for certain areas.
If you think that this is just him “fuming” about the game, you’d be wrong. On his LinkedIn post, many others commented that they noticed this, or cited their own input issues with other games while praising what Gavin and his team did.
