Trivia / Bubsy 3D

• Bad Export for You: Unlike the American version, the PAL version lacks Memory Card saves and uses passwords instead. As if the game wasn't as bad as it already is.
• Bury Your Art: Eidetic, now known as Sony Bend, doesn't mention the game on their website.
• Creator Backlash: Lani Minella has also gone on record saying this is among the games she regrets her voice work on. Among other examples she listed, she considers it one of the cases where she was directed to perform "a totally irritating voice that everyone should hate."
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Lani Minella voiced Bubsy in this game.
• Disowned Adaptation: After having no involvement in Bubsy II, Michael Berlyn was disappointed with how Bubsy 3D turned out. This came from the rushed development cycle and how they initially wanted to give the game a much more complex design.
• Dueling Games: The 3D games had the constant misfortune of competing against much better-received platformers. Michael Berlyn and Accolade were unaware that Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot were being developed at the same time as their Bubsy 3D and believed that they were going to be the first with a fully 3D platform game. Both Accolade and Nintendo showed off their games at E3 1996; upon seeing Super Mario 64, Berlyn realized Bubsy 3D could never compete against it as it was and wanted to start over, but Accolade couldn't afford it and had to release the game as-is to try and recoup development costs. Predictably, it lost against it and Crash Bandicoot (both released before Bubsy 3D) and killed the franchise for the next two decades.
• Franchise Killer: While never a particularly acclaimed series, Bubsy 3D proved to be the killing blow for the video games, banishing Sonic's primary copycat from the mainstream... at least until 2017.
• He Also Did: Hard as it is to believe, the development studio behind the Syphon Filter series and Uncharted: Golden Abyss actually had their start with Bubsy 3D. Soon after the release of Bubsy 3D, Sony bought out developer Eidetic and, a few years after that, renamed them Sony Bend.
• The Other Darrin: Lani Minella took VA duties from Rob Paulsen in this game.
• Troubled Production: Oy...
  • In an interview with RetroGamer on Bubsy 3D, the game's director Richard Ham revealed that development for the game was a mess. The team, on top of being filled with fresh and inexperienced developers, had no real reference as to how a 3D platformer should be made, as landmark titles in the genre such as Super Mario 64 had yet to release as a framework to work off of. As such, they ended up choosing Jumping Flash! as a reference, since it was the only thing remotely close to that.
  • Because of the team's lack of experience, the decision was made to build the game around a higher resolution video mode than most other PS1 games, but thanks to memory constraints, this meant everything else in the game had to be pared down to fit in the console's limited RAM. What made this especially bad was that the team didn't realize until far too late that the devkits they were working on were significantly more powerful than the retail PS1. This means that they built the levels for the devkit's specs, so instead of building smaller, more dense levels that would've fit with the RAM, they had to downgrade the larger levels they'd already made to make them work on the final console. Environmental textures were cut, fog was added, and the number of enemies was reduced, leading to the bland, uninteresting, barren levels the game is infamous for.
  • At this point financially floundering, Accolade also demanded that Eidetic work on four projects at once to try and save the company: Bubsy 3D for the PS1, a Saturn port (itself a difficult task, as the Saturn hardware was completely different from the PS1's), pre-production for a sequel, and an entirely new project called "Jumper". All of these projects ended up being cancelled, doing little more than just splitting the workforce and taking resources away from Bubsy 3D when it needed them the most.
  • When the team saw an early version of Super Mario 64 at 1996's Consumer Electronics Show, they begged Accolade for more time to heavily rework the game so it could actually stand a chance against Mario, but the company was already on the verge of bankruptcy and didn't have the money to extend development any further. As a result, a barely-finished version of the game was released, where it flopped immediately and killed the company - Eidetic itself only barely managing to survive, eventually turning around and releasing Syphon Filter.

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