How Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy WIll Let Me Relive My Most Important Gaming Memories

Crashing back into the past.

By Jonathon Dornbush

We always argued about which was better.

My mom always firmly came down on the side of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. She collected every crystal, gem, and found the secret warp room over and over, restarting the game after every run. I always favored Crash Bandicoot: Warped, with its historical era-hopping levels and time trials that allowed her and I to actually compete to be the better Crash player in our house.

Now with the release of the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, I’m so excited to be able to revisit those memories, because they’ll transport me to a time that I can no longer visit. A time when I could play games with the person who introduced me to the medium — my mom, who died nine years ago.

Of all the ways I’ve tried to keep the memory of my mom in my life, gaming has been perhaps the best at allowing me to, for a brief window, relive those days of playing together. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild brought me back to some of my earliest moments learning about games from her, but with Crash, I’m excited to revisit the best.

I don’t think there was a series of games played more in our house than Crash Bandicoot. As new consoles released and I became the one introducing games into the house, inevitably we’d always return to Crash. More days than I could count I’d come home from school only to find her playing through Cortex Strikes Back, picking up gems she hadn’t discovered the last time around or trying to nail a death route she had missed.

Or she’d be sitting at a small wicker kitchen table we owned, playing on the dim screen of a Game Boy Advance while working through the handheld Crash offshoots by the light of a hanging bulb. Or I’d step in to take over playing Crash Bandicoot: Twinsanity as she coordinated a dozen different phone calls while planning Christmas dinner with our family. (In that case, she always impressed me with her ability to instantly switch from cursing like a Tarantino film while losing lives in the game to holding the most courteous calls with an aunt or grandma.)

No matter the year, Crash remained in heavy rotation in our house. And though we played each new entry — the egregiously long load times of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex became a game in themselves for us, as we’d clock them to see if we actually spent more time playing or waiting — we always returned to Cortex and Warped. We'd fight over our favorite levels and challenge each other on who could clear the most levels without failing. For a few years, Crash became as much a part of our daily regimen as family dinner did.

I owe my love of platformers to spending all that time playing Crash with her, and I credit the absurd number of times my mom and I played through those first three Crash games, collecting everything we could along the way, with making me the type of player I am today. I can still picture how my mom, after learning about the additional gems scattered throughout the game, would push Crash to the limits of every level, attempting to find some hidden path or false entrance. She scoured every inch of each world, and I largely do the same now in just about every game I play.

After she died, I never played Crash again.

And though I’ve continued to play games long after she died, I never played Crash again. I bought the original games on my PS3 as a memento, a digital gravestone marking the biggest influence on my gaming history. I've returned to movies we watched together, shows we tuned in for every week, and other games we played, but I haven’t jumped through every punnily-named level, each jungle temple or futuristic cityscape, in years, afraid to tarnish those memories or the time that we shared.

The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy will be the first time I revisit these games in nearly a decade. The N. Sane Trilogy will bring those memories to life with the glossy sheen that my mind has already given them. And the N. Sane Trilogy will be the first time I revisit one of the biggest bonding points my mom and I shared.

When the N. Sane Trilogy is released, I think I’ll play Cortex Strikes Back first.

Jonathon Dornbush is an Associate Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @jmdornbush.

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