Everyone will know Crash Bandicoot from the good old Playstation 1 and 2 days. The iconic platformer involving the eponymous orange bandicoot was one of those games that was fun to play, but annoyingly addictive, and surprisingly difficult (yes, to this day I still never actually managed the fabled 100% completion).
And then, Crash just seemed to vanish. 2008 saw the release of Mind over Mutant, which quite frankly was abject and insulting to the original whimsy and fun of the first game, and that seemed to sound the death knell for a character once named as ‘the most iconic Playstation character of all time.’ Although Sony previously said they were ‘open’ to revisiting the Crash Bandicoot series in the future, nothing firm ever seemed to materialise and this further cast doubts as to whether Activision were ever going to be able to revive the much loved platformer, or whether it too would be cast off to the video game Mausoleum permanently.
That is, until today. Lex Lang – best known for voice acting Crash’s arch nemesis, the hilariously incompetent Dr. Neo Cortex – has worked Crash Bandicoot fans into a frenzy with his cryptic message. Lang commented on Facebook “Wow! What a throwback Thursday! This week I have been asked to resurrect three different characters that I voiced from 3 different games gone by.”
When pressed for further details, Lang, somewhat unsurprisingly, was not keen to give too much away, although he did add that the three included ‘A doctor, a devil and a droid/AI.’ So why is this comment about his work particularly exciting? Many people have spotted that he has only ever played one doctor in video games before and that doctor was… you guessed it, Neo Cortex. Although it seems a bit of a random decision, some people are accrediting the U-turn by Activision as stemming from the recently released Ratchet and Clank reboot which has been top of the all-format gaming charts for the past two weeks.
Part of me is sad that it isn’t Spyro the Dragon. But. It is Crash Bandicoot!
