Trivia / Crash Team Racing

• Ashcan Copy: Naughty Dog only had a three-game contract with Universal regarding the Crash IP, meaning that CTR was made with very little funding on Universal's end. Couple this with poor work conditions due to the contract being over and the deadline for the game's development being less than a year, and Naughty Dog created CTR as their last hurrah before they lost the rights to Crash (including them attempting to Torch the Franchise and Run using Nitros Oxide). Despite all of these setbacks, the final product turned out to be an incredibly polished game that was one of the PlayStation's best-sellers.
• Bad Export for You: The European/Australian version of the game shortens the length of the scrapbook in order to fit all the extra languages on the disc. Not an atrocity by any means, but still a loss over the original.
• Dummied Out: Penta Penguin, who can only be accessed with a cheat code due to being an unfinished character in the American version, with minor problems such as having placeholder lines like "Penguin Yay 1" mixed in with the normal penguin squawks or having Aku Aku protect him even though the item box shows Uka Uka. This led to him being left out of the normal roster in all versions of the game, even though these issues are fixed internationally.
• Follow the Leader: Openly copies the formula of Mario Kart. Perfectly. Some might say it even surpasses Mario Kart 64.
  • Some of the tracks are based off of Mario originals as well, mostly those from Mario Kart 64. For example — Coco Park is like Luigi Raceway, while Tiny Arena is similar to Wario Stadium. A really clear one is Cortex Castle, a go-cart race through the castle of the series' (usual) Big Bad filled with right-angle turns.
  • The items follow the same formula for the most part. Rockets instead of Red Shells, Clocks instead of Lightning, Warp Orbs instead of Spiny Shells, Bowling Bombs instead of Green Shells, Chemical Beakers instead of Bananas and TNT/Nitro Crates instead of Fake Item Boxes, etc. Differentiated in that they get boosted if you have 10 Wumpa Fruits, a feature no Mario Kart game has done.
  • In the other direction, CTR brought back some Mario Kart features into 3D that only appeared in Mode-7 Mario Karts until Wii and 7: namely, not having to wiggle the stick for drift boosting (though you do press a button to gain a boost in place of wiggling the stick), and having speed-increasing boost pads on the field.
  • In an interesting inversion of this trope, CTR created a system where hopping off a jump gives a racer a boost upon landing, which Mario Kart games later implemented after seeing it work so well in this game. You know you did well when the work you were imitating later goes on to imitate you.
• Older Than They Think: Mario Kart Wii introduced tricks which award the driver with a boost upon landing if they make enough hangtime with a hop. CTR had the same mechanic earlier, minus the actual tricks.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Hynden Walch replaces Vicki Winters as Coco.
  • Oddly, despite Brendan O'Brien reprising his roles as N. Gin, Tiny and Pinstripe, Chip Chinery replaces him as the voice of Crash.
  • David Anthony Pizzuto replaces William Hootkins as Dingodile.
• Post-Script Season: Naughty Dog's original contract with Universal was only for three games, which would've been Crash 1-3. They made this one as a swan song for the fans.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: The reason for Nitros Oxide's existence. According to Jason Rubin during an E3 panel, since the team at Naughty Dog knew this was going to be their last Crash game, they wanted to kill the franchise by Jumping the Shark, and they thought nobody would be able to take the game seriously if they added an alien. Obviously, it didn't work.
  Jason Rubin: We actually tried to kill Crash. In CTR, we said "What won't anybody believe?" Because this was our last game. "Let's put aliens in. We'll bring in an alien, no one will like Crash after that cause there's an alien. This'll be the end, we've jumped the shark, the alien came into CTR." Everybody loved it!
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • You cannot unlock Oxide, and even with a cheating device he is not playable in all tracks due to being too large. Keep that in mind when looking for cheats for this game. Doesn't help that beating all the Tropy ghosts unlocks N. Tropy, therefore many assumed beating all the Oxide ghosts would unlock him, but instead it unlocks a way to get to the scrapbook from the main menu that normally requires you to beat the much easier story mode.
  • Similarly, Komodo Moe is not in the game, despite the presence of his brother Komodo Joe. This led to the usual rumors and hoaxes claiming that Moe could be unlocked by beating the game through highly specific conditions.
  • A series of misunderstandings created the myth of a cut racer by the name of Fasty the Hippo. Looking within the game's code turned up the name Fasty, which people assumed to be a cut racer. Adding to this, Bob Rafei, one of the concept artists on the game, had a picture on his website in the Crash Team Racing gallery of a blue hippo in a pilot outfit. These two were combined together to form the myth of Fasty the Hippo, but the reality is that these two were unrelated. The name "Fasty" didn't have anything to do with cut content, and the hippo Bob Rafei drew didn't even have anything to do with CTR at all. His name was actually Trippo, and he was a proposed mascot he made for a friend of his who wanted to start a website for comparing airline prices, and he was placed in the CTR section of his website entirely by mistake. However, almost twenty years later, this myth actually gave birth to a new character in the CTR remake, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Hasty the Moose, a Captain Ersatz to "Fasty" who shares a very similar name, a nearly identical character silhouette apart from the antlers, and a nearly identical outfit.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally the game started out with block-headed characters with no Crash or otherwise related personalities. If Sony didn't make the deal with Universal the game would have been either canceled or have original characters.
  • Nitros Oxide was originally a mad scientist obsessed with speed who plotted to speed up the entire world until the end of time. However, having exhausted human, animal, machine, and various combinations for Crash Bandicoot bosses in the past, it was decided to have Oxide be an otherworldly character (mainly to possibly kill off the franchise). The original "speed up the world" plot is referenced in a promotional comic (written by Glenn Herdling and drawn by Neal Sternecky) featured in the Winter 2000 issue of Disney Adventures.
  • According to an article published by Electronic Games Magazine a month before the game's release and a Q&A Interview with Jason Rubin, the player would receive Gold Wrenches by beating a level or boss in order to upgrade the kart's performance. The reason why they were removed is unknown.
  • Originally, Ripper Roo was gonna be fully voiced, and speak in full sentences no less!
  • According to an interview with Naughty Dog's vice president, Evan Wells, Polar and Pura were originally going to be sitting in one kart as a single racer, as were Komodo Joe and Komodo Moe. However, these ideas were scrapped due to the memory limitations of the PlayStation.
  • Originally Oxide was going to be playable but due to his large size, he couldn't fit in the memory of the game's multiplayer mode and the size of his model made him too big for some of the tracks in the game, leading to a lot of model clipping and lag.
  • Oxide Station, already the second-longest track in the game after Tiny Arena, was originally going to be much longer, with the track even separating into four different paths at one point. The track was changed and streamlined because it caused the PlayStation to lag too much.
  • There are two tracks in CTR that seemingly don't belong to any character: Mystery Caves and Sewer Speedway. Word of God has it that these tracks belonged to two planned racers, Koala Kong and Nitrus Brio. However, there wasn't enough space available in the game for more than 15 racers, so both of them ended up being cut from the final game. They eventually became playable in the remake.

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