Toy company NECA has said that recent comments made by its director of product development Randy Falk, in which he implied Sony will reboot the venerated Crash Bandicoot series, were “misunderstood”.
In a statement to GameSpot, an NECA spokesperson commented, “Someone has misunderstood a comment he made. Randy saw a faked fan-made image right before he came to the show and said that if the game were coming back, we’d love to do figures.”
Falk made his comments in a Pixel Dan interview this past weekend during the New York Toy Fair and said his company is excited about the Crash Bandicoot franchise’s future.
“Finally, we’ve been able to get back in with Sony,” he said, referring to the new figurines it’s making for games such as Uncharted and God of War. “Looking at some of their other titles, I see they’re bringing Crash Bandicoot back, which is really cool.”
NECA has produced a range of figures inspired by Sony franchises which will be released this year. They include Nathan Drake from Uncharted, Kratos from God of War, and Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet. The interview was promoted by NECA on its Twitter account.
A few week ago, the official PlayStation Middle East Twitter account posted the following tweet, which translates into English as “Most wanted person… where are you Crash?”
أكثر شخص مطلوب… أين أنت يا كراش؟ pic.twitter.com/aj85Ap018v
— PlayStation Arabia (@PlayStation_ME) February 6, 2016
Prior to that, SCEA boss Shawn Layden appeared in a Crash t-shirt during the PlayStation Experience show in December 2015, but announcements about a Crash revival were not made during that show.
The last Crash Bandicoot game released on home consoles was Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant in 2008 from publisher Activision. Before being acquired by Sony, the Crash Bandicoot series was created by Naughty Dog and developed exclusively for PlayStation platforms before Activision acquired the rights.
There were suggestions in November 2013 that ownership of the Crash IP may have passed back to Sony when all mention of series was pulled from Activision’s website. At the time, Activision stated that it still retained ownership of the franchise and was examining how to “explore ways in which we could bring the beloved series back to life.”
Naughty Dog has stated that it would consider making a new Crash but that’s a problematic prospect given that it’s a Sony-owned developer.
In July 2014, PlayStation boss Andrew House said the series could return.
