In a recent video interview, the former PlayStation president Shuhei Yoshida opened up about the process of selling Crash Bandicoot to the Japanese market.
This included providing an amazing explanation as to why the game was made easier for Japanese players, and how he used one of the Donkey Kong Country games to demonstrate the Naughty Dog title was a little too challenging.
Since leaving Sony earlier this year, Yoshida has continued working to champion indie developers but has also found time to speak with various outlets about his incredible 31 years at PlayStation, with the ex-GameTrailers writer and video creator Kyle Bosman being among the latest to sit down with the former boss over a call.
During this roughly hour-long conversation, Yoshida spoke to Bosman about the process of building out the internal development team at Sony in the early years of the PlayStation, before being asked if he could remember the first time he came up with "a good idea". This led Yoshida to reminisce about the development of Crash Bandicoot and his suggestion that the difficulty of the game should be turned down.
Yoshida recalled:
"When I played the game, from the view of the Japanese market, the game looked too hard. Like many Western games, the game didn’t explain itself. Many Japanese games do handholding. [There are] lots of nice, smooth, accommodations for players to enjoy games."
Speaking about how he got the team to listen to his input, Yoshida stated that it was likely because he had done his homework, coming up with a theory that Crash's lack of variety was leading the developers to artificially raise the challenge to make up for this deficiency.
He reportedly supplied a breakdown of how the current build compared to Nintendo's latest Donkey Kong Country game in terms of enemy and item variety in order to express this, which the team received in good faith:
"The one thing that might have got them to be interested to hear me was the first meeting, when I was assigned as a producer, I already had the game in development to play and I had certain ideas I wanted to communicate, and that was the game is too hard. [...] So I wanted to communicate only that part — this game is too hard. So I looked at the then-latest Super Nintendo game from Nintendo: Donkey Kong Country. I purchased the strategy guide and I counted the number of new elements for each level and when they are introduced. I counted the number of variety of enemies and bosses. And I brought that to the meeting and explained and compared. I created a chart like 'This is Crash Bandicoot in the making' and 'This is Donkey Kong Country' and compared these two in terms of numbers and data. They like what we did."
As Yoshida stated, this feedback led to the developers eventually deciding to put together a new version for the Japanese launch of the game, which would feature several alterations to make the game easier. This included everything from shortening stages like The High Road to introducing additional tips that appear on the screen, and changing the size of platforms in the levels Upstream and Up The Creek:
"Because the game was planned to release in the US in September, but in Japan, December was the biggest time of the year for the game market (the end of the year) we had a three-month gap where Mark agreed, ‘Okay, we’ll do things only for the Japanese version.’ So not just localising, but he came up with the idea of when you pick up an Aku Aku mask, the mask for the Japanese version comes to the screen and there’s a one screen of explanation like X to jump or something, to explain the game for the first few levels."
You can listen to the full interview here.