Wumpa League Leak

An image for Crash Bandicoot's Wumpa League may have just been leaked.

Paul Yan, Studio Head and Chief Creative Officer at Toys For Bob, hosted a discussion at this year's Game Developer's Conference. In the discussion, he relayed the approach the development studio took when modernising a classic IP for Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (Crash 4). However, during this admittedly fascinating talk, this image showed on screen for a brief second at 25:25 in the video:

But what could it mean?!

Many Crash fans, myself included, think that the image wasn't supposed to show up. That may seem obvious to some, but you never know - it could have been purposely shown to generate hype. That would be hype for a new game, which fans have taken to call Wumpa League.

History of Wumpa League

Wumpa League was a title revealed in a special video released that showed Crash and Coco playing an Uncharted game. This was initially thought to be a cute little video giving back to how Uncharted 4 showed the main character, Nathan Drake, play a classic level in the original Crash Bandicoot. However, the background shows a banner revealing the very title we're now speculating on:

So... what the heck is it?

A lot of speculation formed around the details - something I didn't initially cover as I didn't think it was anything. One theory was that Wumpa League was an in-universe competitive league of some sort, as made evidence by a piece of concept art during the ending of Crash 4. This image shows a e-sports style competition of some sort, complete with 'W' banners about:

That's not all! After max percent completion of the game, spinning the starting level's TV produces a strange wumpa fruit logo...

Added to this was yet another leaking of details, this time from TheGamingRevolution on Twitter. They mentioned that a Player versus Player Crash game was expected to come out, unrelated to Crash: On The Run. This seemed likely that 'Wumpa League' was this competitive PVP game:

And then nothing was heard from the title again. Until now.

Speculation

Paul Yan's image quite clearly shows a logo which looks like the one from Crash 4's TV, just with the W featured from the same game's ending. This is most certainly related to Wumpa League.

Crash Bandicoot's 25th anniversary is literally a few weeks away now (9th September), and the celebrations have been... admittedly sparse, so far. We had some nice reveals of Crash 4 heading to the Nintendo Switch earlier this year, and a few social media images of the suited Crash guy travelling the world, but that's really about it. So, the natural assumption would be that Wumpa League is an upcoming game designed for Crash's 25th anniversary.

Will this be the case? We'll soon find out, I'm sure!

In the meantime, I will leave one more little bit of info regarding some potential plans for the anniversary. I don't put a lot ot stock into 4Chan leaks (in face, I put none into them as they're generally baseless), but it's fun speculating about things, so here's a 'leak' from 4Chan covering plans for the anniversary:

Whatever this all means, come back soon to find out more!