Crash Bandicoot Co-Creator Believes The Remakes “Botched” The Jump Mechanics

Only the most important feature, no big deal

• by Ollie Reynolds Yesterday, 4:15pm

Andrew Gavin, co-creator of developer Naughty Dog alongside Jason Rubin, was fundamental in the development of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy, acting as producer, leader programmer, and designer.

So he knows his stuff, then. So when the subject of the remake trilogy cropped up in a post on LinkedIn (thanks, Nintendo Everything), we certainly took noticed. Released in 2017 and developed by Vicarious Visions (now Blizzard Albany), Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy was generally well received for its faithfulness to the original games, but according to Gavin, the developers “botched” the jump mechanics.

Gavin heaps praise upon the remake trilogy, saying that it “got almost everything right” and “nailed the visuals”. However, he notes that because the remakes don’t implement the same control scheme in which the game would measure how long you pressed the jump button, thus adjusting the height of the jump accordingly, you’re instead left with fixed-height jumps.

Here’s what he had to say:

“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, kept the spirit. Then they completely botched how jumping works.

“On the original PlayStation, we only had digital buttons – pressed or not pressed. No analog sticks. Players needed different height jumps, but we only had binary input. Most games used the amateur solution: detect button press, trigger fixed-height jump. Terrible for platforming.

“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.

“The remake developers either didn’t notice this system or thought it wasn’t important. They reverted to simple fixed jumps. Then realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their solution was to make all jumps maximum height. Now every jump on the remake is huge and floaty. Those precise little hops between platforms are awkward. The game’s fundamental jumping mechanic feels worse than the 1996 original despite running on hardware that’s 1000x more powerful.

“The minutiae of timing and feel matter a lot more than people realize.”

So despite his praise, Gavin’s criticism on the jump mechanics feels pretty damning given how vital they are to the overall feel of the games. It’s quite literally the whole experience.

Still, the N.Sane Trilogy is pretty good fun regardless, and if you’ve yet to try it out on Switch, you can probably find it pretty cheap these days. In our 7/10 review, we said that “despite some odd design choices it still manages to be a really enjoyable retread of some old classics”.

What do you make of Andrew Gavin’s comments on the N.Sane Trilogy? Do you agree with his thoughts? Leave a comment and let us know.