Zitat
Ami Blaire
(Crash Bandicoot marketing manager, SCEA)
I don't remember the Naughty Dog part, but there are some certain characteristics of a character that make for a successful character in Japan. So here in America, there are cartoon characters with only four fingers, for example. Well, you have to have five fingers in Japan. There's little subtle things like that that were important in order to ensure the appeal of that character for the Japanese market that goes against the grain of traditional animation here in the U.S. in particular.
Dave Baggett
(programmer, Naughty Dog)
They wanted the character to look more, for lack of a better word, plasticine and stretchy, rubbery. So that required some art changes. But there were tons of changes to the fundamental game. I don't remember all of them. There were tuning things to make it easier. Interestingly, the easiest version was the Japanese one. The hardest one was the European one and the [American release] was sort of in the middle. ...
I remember some specific changes that were kind of amusing. You know you're supposed to get all the boxes [in a level] and if you missed boxes then it counts them down by having them fall on Crash's head, and the word came back that the Japanese children who played it found this deeply disturbing. They were very upset by that. So we could just count them instead of having them land on his head and stuff like that. Another example was, there's a humorous death. You know, we have all the funny death animations. I think it was the one where he blows up and the only thing that comes down is like his eyeballs and his shoes. Apparently there had been some horrible serial killer incident or something in Japan that this reminded the Japanese of, so that had to come out. It was stuff like that. ...
The other thing is it was totally different music. So I produced the music and Josh Mancell wrote all the music and I worked with him to get it into the game, and it was totally different music for the Japanese one. I don't remember everything that was different, but [there] was a lot of changes to the music. That was a big [change] because they didn't like the music that we had done for the American one; they thought it was too edgy or something. A lot of the feedback we got in general was, "It's just too edgy. We want to soften it a bit in a bunch of different ways."
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