10 Special Crash Mania Memories

Crash Mania, the 16 year-old Crash Bandicoot fansite, is now no longer being updated. Created by long-time Crash fan, HPZr (Hidden Palace Zoner) back in 2005, the website united Crash content and efforts from the community and games alike. Alongside it was the Crash Mania forum, which saw plenty of fond memories during my time as a member, moderator and then administrator during its run.

https://t.co/kNM7vnmHcf

It's the final update in Crash Mania's 16-year-long history. It would never have been possible without your support, and you all have my deepest gratitude for always keeping me going.

See you around, and remember to be kind and follow your dreams!! 😊

— Crash Mania (@Crash_Mania) April 16, 2021

So, I figured it was worth commemorating the website and its old forum by remembering some of its greatest stuff. And whilst I entirely understand HPZr's decision to no longer update the website, I wanted to give the site one last party of memories from a guy who's seen it from its inception. Here are 10 special Crash Mania memories to party to:

1: The Inception of Crash Mania

The first one is a story on how Crash Mania came to be. To understand its origins, let's jump back to 2005, when Crash was owned by Vivendi Universal (VU).

The VU forums was a fun, colourful place which I found in late 2003. Whilst originally housing just a few Crash fans, it eventually grew to host some fans that are still hugely prominent today (JumpButton of Crystal's Wrath fame, Tara of Outcast Bandicoot origins, and JenL/DrNeoTropy of Nina comic recognition, to name but a few). I made plenty of friends there, including DDL (Dingodilelover) and CHS (CrashHomestarRunner), many of whom I still talk with to this day. HPZr joined in early 2005, just after the launch of Crash Twinsanity (2004). In fact, many people joined just after Twinsanity and it was clear that game had brought a resurgence of fans to the place, some with questions about how to progess at particular points and some just wanting to be involved with the community.

Then, later that same year, the Crash VU forum received an overhaul.

It made sense, as the original header was old art from Crash: The Huge Adventure/XS (2002), so all the boards were branded with an unified, ugly grey. With the redesign came a slew of immature fans and the place became somewhat difficult to deal with. At the same time, HPZr had been wanting to make a website that collated and created Crash content for fans, by fans. This became Crash Mania and, with it, came a new forum that many of us VU oldies joined. Crash Mania was born.

2: The Crash Mania Forums

The Crash Mania forums were a special place which I helped moderate and admin for several years (under Smaz, of course). In fact, the place was so special that I'll be breaking this down into other points! For now, I would like to outline how wonderful that forum was.

You had the general discussion area, where everything and anything could be discussed. Sometimes there were jokes. I remember a topic being made asking what posters people liked to hang up. This was followed by a topic of asking what people had in their fridge at current. Then, the trilogy was complete with a topic about what posters people hung up in their fridge. It was silly, but it put a smile on my face. There were more serious things too, of couse, but the general discussion area really could be about anything.

Then there were the game creation areas (more on that later), Crash discussions and things about specific games.

The forum often received people joining for the sole purpose of asking a Crash-related question and then that would be the last you ever see of them. Things like... how to progress after a certain point in Crash Twinsanity's Doc Amok, where Cortex always dies on some spikes. To avoid all the topics that had things like this, particularly as there would be multiple ones with the same question, I decided to collate them into a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). This would then end up on the main Crash Mania website and, as a result, the forums were much cleaner of those sorts of questions. I didn't have to do that, but decided it would be worthwhile. And plenty of people did things like that on the forum, brimming with ideas to help and add to the website.

Crash fan art quickly became a thing. Fans would create fan art on the forums and submit it to the website. These would then show up on a fan art page. Boss guides also fell into this sort of category of submitting something that fans could make use of an enjoy on the main website. But one final area deserves it's own section. That one is...

3: The Stellar Interviews

If there's one thing that Crash Mania excelled at, it was the interviews.

Many of us were big fans and, as such, had attempted to contact big cheeses in the Crash industry for interviews. These connections sometimes stood the test of time well beyond the original contact for an interview for the website, with people like Paul Gardner (head of Traveller's Tales Oxford during Crash Twinsanity - 2004) and Kirsten Forbes (head of Radical Entertainment during Crash Tag Team Racing - 2005, Crash of the Titans - 2007 and Crash: Mind Over Mutant - 2008) being particularly strong throughout the years.

So, the Crash Mania community came together to pitch questions for the interviews. The best would be selected and then asked during the interview. It was such a collaborative effort, too, and really saw everyone come together. As such, the Crash Mania interviews were often really good. There were questions asked that fans genuinely wanted to know and weren't restricted to what other website journalists were allowed to ask. This meant that the answers were often far more interesting than what magazines and websites could glean, which I remember was a particular frustration amongst us when we'd see the same things asked all the time.

The Backstage section of Crash Mania features some particularly juicy interviews that you should definitely check out. Whether that's by Jason Rubin (co-head of Naughty Dog during Crash Bandicoot - 1996, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back - 1997, Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED - 1998, and Crash Team Racing - 1999), Paul Yan (head of Toys for Bob during Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time), or even Dave Siller's story in The Untold Story, Crash Mania has it all.

4: CMTV

Speaking of community projects, Crash Mania TV (CMTV) was one of the two biggest that ever happened.

CMTV was a claymotion clip show created by member, BandicootMask, or B-Mask if you'd prefer. The original idea was to make a show about the forum and its community, with different members hosting their own sections. Any personas would be represented in clay, usually of B-Mask's design. CMTV caught the imagination of the the forum members and, as such, everyone pulled together to make it a reality.

My personal favourite segment was CrashFan's news room piece. He would often be with a co-host, such as Eris, and bring to light new Crash news of the week. This was how big news events like the Crash Bandicoot (1996) prototype was conveyed to the community, showing off the secret level Stormy Ascent, as well as The Wrath of Cortex (2001) pitch video and Crash Landed (2010) Dingodile scene.

Other CMTV segments included Korusan and BMT's game reviews, my Crash retrospective pieces and Polyrhythm's art corner. All with low-quality microphones of the era, of course! We'd send our recorded bits to B-Mask with our own video content edited together, and he would often ask for any lines he'd like to link the material together or his own script bits to put in where he'd then create the claymotion sequences.

Sometimes, B-Mask and I would play tennis with a ball of ideas, leading to scripted sections such as the panel-like gameshow and parodies of movies. My personal favourite was always the CMTV Christmas Carol, where myself, JumpButton and HPZr played the three ghosts that haunt forumer, Slick, who used Scrooge McDuck as his avatar.

Season 2 of CMTV started shifting away from the forum confines a bit, for better or for worse, and over time started to become its own universe with its own character-related plots. Whilst they were fun at the time, I think this shift moved away from what CMTV originally was, and I wasn't fond of its future. However, just as it was doing so, CMTV collapsed under its own weight and no more episodes were ever made. While none of the episodes are available to watch on YouTube anymore, I did create a compilation section for my own YouTube channel from the clips I had on DVD (yes, I wrote most of the episodes to DVD at the time - a decision that's meant the episodes survive in one form or another):

B-Mask has since moved on to create Beyond Pictures, which you can find on YouTube here. And what remains of CMTV will always be a fond memory of how everyone came together to make something fun. I can't think of many other forum examples of that.

Except for one.

5: Crash Mania Melee

Home Cooked Games was an area of the forum where many members created their own 2D games. Rob3DG made his own Wolfestein-esque game, JumpButton made things such as Crash Energon and General Awesome at the time, and I tried to make Crash Mania Melee.

Actually, the game went through multiple names. It was first Crash vs Forums, then Crash Mania Melee, Crash Mania Brawl and finally Clash Mania. I think Crash Mania Melee was the one that stuck most of all and, as you've probably guessed, was a clone of Super Smash Brothers Melee. Well, at least in terms of gameplay.

Crash Mania Melee involved various forum members beating each other up to a 4 player match. The game was made on Game Maker and was coded in a way that you would have to whittle down the opposition's health bar and, once empty, you would need to land a STRIKE attack to KO them. Three KOs, or STRIKES, and they were banned, just like on the Crash Mania forum.

And people went nuts for it.

A forum member called Mecha was the one mostly dealing with the coding side of things, whilst I did the original frame for the game and 2D artwork. It was a long time ago and I did it all on MS Paint. Looking back on it though, I did a heck of a lot of spritework for the game, with larger ones for earlier versions and smaller ones for later iterations. Unfortunately, it never did see the light of day after Mecha disappeared from the forum in mysterious circumstances. I also lost a lot of the sprites in a computer crash, but I still have a lot of the base work, as you can see from these forum members here:

It did bring the forum together, too. Lot of people wanted in. In the spirit of keeping it as involved as possible, I had many of them record the lines for their representative characters, too. It was a pretty enjoyable project during my time in school and then early on in (junior) college, to be honest.

Whilst it never may have been released, we did eventually get a Crash Mania Racing game from another member. This was a top-down racer which featured sprites made by the community, too. It was a small game, only really of a few characters and tracks, but in the end it was the best we got in terms of a released Crash Mania game!

6: Time Trials

Before proper in-game online leader boards, there were the Crash Mania leader boards. Specifically, the Crash Mania Time Trial leader boards. Available in the Record Book, the Time Trial leader boards were chock full of competition back in the day.

On the Crash Mania forum, people would compete against one another and submit their times. The new best times would last for, ooooh maybe a few hours or days, before someone else beat them. And I was obsessed with having a good time one at least one level.

A fond memory I have is trying to beat everyone's time for Toad Village - the first level in Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED (1998). This reached a point where we were looking more at world records. I would come back home from school or junior college, do some homework, then spend the rest of my time trying to be number one on that level. I'd play Toad Village again and again, shaving milliseconds off my time. This led to someone beating the time by something ridiculous like 5 seconds, to which I was in utter disbelief.

In fact, I was in so much disbelief over having my Toad Village time beaten by so many seconds, the guy sent me his copy of the game to check it over in case it was scratched up and running faster than expected. Stupid, I know. Anyhow, I ran some tests and the game was fine, so I sent it back.

HPZr and I also had this competitive streak on Mad Bombers, of all levels. The time on this level got more and more ridiculous. This competitive streak caused a number on my left thumb in the end. I used the D-pad on the controller, and I was pressing so hard and long on them during my time obsessing over these Time Trial times, that the nerves in my thumb were shot for almost a week.

The Record Book is still live and many people have since come and gone, besting times with ease. Emulation always makes that side easier too, of course, but HPZr and I always kept it to the original game and disk. In the end, Toad Village, Deep Trouble, High Time, Double Header and Mad Bombers - my levels of obsession, never stood a chance.

7: ssjohn's Meltdown

Few things are funnier than one someone absolutely loses it over something trivial. In the case of Crash Mania forum's first time poster, ssjohn, this was the memorable result:

8: Dingodile555 and Crash Advance 4

"My friend had a gba game called Crash Advance 4 and the controls were A to spin, B to jump. It had long and extremely difficult levels in it. He told me his aunt in Saudi Arabia sent him it but now he has lost and tells me he bought it in Game and the box had Crash holding a wumpa fruit in the cover. Has anyone else heard of this game?"

These now immortal words from Crash Mania forum user, Dingodile555, signalled the start of the Crash Advance IV intrigue. The words became a meme amongst Crash fans and were posted at random points throughout the years, almost always getting a laugh from me.

Then, one day, FierceTheBandit actually found the GameBoy Advance game on eBay:

I eventually acquired that copy and went through a lot of pains to try and get the content out there. I contacted HPZr about all the details first for Crash Mania, given its origins. You can then read and see all the details on Crash Mania as well as my own story about the journey to reach that point. If it's the one lasting legacy I have with the Crash community, then so be it!

9: Polyrhythm

The biggest memory I have was meeting Polyrhythm on the Crash Mania forum.

I had just gone to university she had joined. We spoke a lot in those early days, as she was interested in going to the university I had just started at (Falmouth). So, we spoke and spoke... and learned we had a lot in common. What started as friendly conversation eventually led to us meeting up, as we were in the same country.

The next Valentine's Day, we confessed our feelings for one another, and it all snowballed from there. We would write each other penned letters and cheer each other up when times were hard. Post-uni, I eventually moved in with her and her parents, being that I found myself homeless, jobless, almost friendless and, well, without my dad, which I am forever thankful for. If not for her, I would not be alive right now.

So, we eventually married, moved in together... and sad circumstances occur, as we separated just before the COVID-19 pandemic. There's never a day that goes by where I don't think about her.

But, I owe many happy years and memories to meeting Polyrhythm on Crash Mania. It may have even saved my life. For that, I am thankful.

10: The Crash Screenshots

You know what these are. You must do. Crash Mania catalogues every Crash game. With this comes a selection of screenshots from each game, usually two from every level. HPZr didn't stop there, though.

Each Crash game screenshot comes complete with humorous captions. I have many happy memories going through each and every one of these, finding humour in the most mundane of areas or locations. They really livened up each screenshot and honestly are well worth going through.

Crash Tag Team Racing (2005), for example, features a screenshot of Crash in the midway theme park, with a child in the background facing a wall. The caption reads "The kid would rather just stare at the wall than see a giant bandicoot running around." Stuff like that is just a lot of fun to read.

Speaking of screenshots, I remember a time we unconvered a hidden love message behind a wall where a camera wouldn't normally see. That was in Crash Tag Team Racing too, and boy was that fun to unravel on the forums. Good times.

Here's to You, Crash Mania

There are plenty more bits and bobs from the Crash Mania website that are well worth your time, too. The site isn't going anywhere and you can still check out all the game archives, collectibles and old blogs.

Beyond that, many other fans have taken up the mantle of Crash content these days and I recommend you support them too, if you haven't already. Whether it's Canadian Guy Eh? for speculative content or Crashy News for literally everything else news related, make sure you check in on them as well as here.

For now, I'm going to leave the memories of Crash Mania and its forum there. There were many good times, there were many bad times, but hell, the community was never stronger during its run, keeping Crash alive even beyond the post-2008 hiatus.

Take care, Crash Mania, here's to your legacy.