The multi-platform racing game Crash Nitro Kart could have been "the last of Crash", according to Crash Bandicoot co-creator and character designer Charles Zembillas.
Zembillas recently spoke to Time Extension for an interview about his career, during which he discussed his journey as an artist in the animation and video game industry.
As part of this chat, he spoke about the process of creating Crash alongside his friend and former DIC colleague, Joe Pearson, and also dropped some interesting titbits about other games he worked on, including the kart racer, which he states essentially "saved" the series, despite receiving mixed critical reviews.
Crash Nitro Kart, in case you're unfamiliar, was released in 2003 and was developed by Vicarious Visions, which replaced the Crash Team Racing developers and the original Crash studio, Naughty Dog. It was released for PS2, Xbox, GameCube (a Game Boy Advance game was also released under the same title), and notably saw Crash's co-designers, Zembillas and Pearson, reunite to work together on the art, alongside other talented artists like John Nevarez (who later went to Pixar) and Snakebite Cortez.
As Zembillas tells us, when he was approached to work on the game, he was told a lot was reportedly riding on the success of the title, stating that there were some considerations of putting the series on ice if the game didn't do well:
"I was told by Vicarious Visions at the beginning of Crash Nitro Kart that if the game didn't do well, this would be the last of Crash. That's why they came to me and why I brought Joe Pearson into it. I put together the entire development team with extremely high-level artists. We did a great job. It did well enough to keep things going, and we have Crash to this day because of it. Whatever the critics said about CNK's gameplay, Vicarious Visions saved Crash Bandicoot."
Prior to Nitro Kart, Universal Interactive had already published a few other non-Naughty Dog-related games, including the Eurocom-developed Crash Bash, Traveller's Tales Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex, and two Vicarious Visions-developed handheld games, Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure and Crash Bandicoot: N-Tranced, all of which had failed to reach the heights of the original trilogy on PS1. It's easy to understand, then, why Universal Interactive might have been considering retiring the character, or at the very least giving it an indefinite break while it figured out what to do next.
It appears that after Nitro Kart was released, it sold well enough, however, to justify continuing the series, leading to further titles throughout the 2000s under Vivendi, which kept Crash alive for a little bit longer, even though the quality of these titles wasn't always the best.
The series was eventually rebooted in 2017 with the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, a remake of the original Naughty Dog trilogy. This was followed by a remake of Crash Team Racing in 2019 and a new Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time in 2020.
As of 2026, the most recent title in the Crash Bandicoot series was Toys For Bob's online multiplayer game Crash Team Rumble (which has stopped receiving content updates as of 2024), with the series seemingly having been put to rest by its owner, Activision Blizzard.