Crash Team Racing 2010 Prototype Movie Leaked Online

In 2009, to compliment Radical Entertainment's reboot of the Crash Bandicoot series, High Impact Games (Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier) was launched to make a new Crash Team Racing game, rebooting the 1999 classic. It was finally canceled in 2010 after just 4-5 months of development, but 16 years later, an hour of unedited footage has surfaced online, giving us our best look at the project yet.

Crash Team Racing would eventually return under Beenox, and it was a hit, earning an aggregate score of 90 percent on OpenCritic.

David Goodrich, who was the sole game designer on the reboot, was streaming the fan-made Twisted Metal 5 game when he decided to pull some footage from the canceled Crash Team Racing project for suggestions on what the team could implement. At that moment, someone took a screenshot of the unlisted YouTube URL and soon after, fans cracked the link, downloaded the video, archived and uploaded it to the internet, and then shared it with the community.

While disappointed, Goodrich took the leak with surprising good humor. Almost immediately after, he gave an interview with Canadian Guy Eh on YouTube to shed some light on how the project came about, including a bizarre pitch to Activision in the form of a David Attenborough-style Crash Bandicoot documentary.

“We got a very interesting, well-made movie, which I think is what made this game for Activision, where it was a David Attenborough-style documentary about Crash and the problems and tribulations he had surviving on the island and the predators he had to avoid, how he got food and then obviously interacting with the 'Bandicooties,' I think Goodrich said he called them.”

“One of those shots was actually the Land Shark concept, and then, in this David Attenborough documentary they showed us, Crash is walking along the beach, and he's kind of looking for trash and food and stuff, and he's finding trash to actually build little gadgets and stuff—stuff that washed up on the beach because all this factory in the island was a style that he had in Gilliga: bamboo but then also, 'Hey a bottle that washes up on the beach, and I can combine those two things to make a little gadget to help me in my adventures on the island.'

And over here we see a wild crash bandicoot mocking a shark

In the movie, Crash is walking along the beach and sees a shark fin sticking out of the water. Of course, as Crash usually does, he sticks out his tongue (or taunts it in some other way – Goodrich wasn't quite sure), teasing it so much that it jumps out of the water and starts flopping on the beach like a worm.

“He's like, 'Oh shit!' and he runs, and he climbs a coconut tree and the shark even goes halfway up but can't get all the way up, and then drops and eventually goes back into the ocean and just looks at him from the side, Goodrich explained. “It was a really cool video, and it was narrated by this guy with a British voice and everything. It was really fun.”

Canadian Guy Eh asked if Goodrich had a copy of the mockumentary that he could share with fans, but alas, “he doesn't.”

Crash Team Racing Reboot Shark Game Screenshot.

At the time of this pitch, High Impact Games had just been hit with layoffs and lost about 75 percent of the team after the lukewarm response to its Jak and Daxter PSP games, but the studio's owner had connections at Activision and was able to land the Crash Team Racing game as part of the transition from handheld spin-offs to flagship consoles to save his extensive console releases. experience.

Unfortunately, Activision would soon cancel the game, and while the studio was able to pull together a Phineas and Ferb tie-in for the Wii just a year later, it wouldn't prove enough to save them from going under.