Activision may have accidentally set the internet on fire when they finally announced the long-awaited Crash Team Racing remaster during The Game Awards in December last year.
The brief trailer we glimpsed then showed a beloved racing game restored in all its brightly coloured glory, with a gorgeous visual overhaul that makes the whole thing look… well, exactly as fantastic as it looked in our memories.
UNILAD Gaming recently headed to London to have a bit of a go on the remaster. While there, we had a chat with Stéphane Gravel, Production Director at Beenox and Lead Developer of CTR: Nitro Fueled.
For those of you who might be worried that the game won’t live up to the original PlayStation classic, Gravel assured us that the team at Beenox are keen to “make sure it lives up to the standard it set 20 years ago.”
He explained:
We know that fans have been asking for the game for a long time now. We are doing our best in providing them an authentic CTR experience with of course of course fully remastered graphics and a whole lot more like the addition of online multiplayer and the possibility to race against your friends and compete on the leaderboards.
If online leaderboards and racing sound a bit too new fangled for you purists, then you’ll be happy to know that “authenticity” was one of the “three pillars” of development, according to Gravel.
As such, you’ll probably be relieved to hear that the classic control scheme will remain in the game, and will be completely unchanged. Gravel told us this was key, given it’s “how people remember it, and this is what sets it apart from other kart racers out there.”
Just because Beenox is keen on creating an authentic gameplay experience doesn’t mean they aren’t having some fun putting their own touches on the game, however.
Gravel told us how the team are “embellishing” the tracks while keeping true to their original spirit. All 18 classic tracks are making a return, along with all seven from the battle mode, which is making its triumphant return.
He explained:
We’re not touching anything related to the track themselves. I mean you are still racing the exact same layouts as you were 20 years ago. Its just that we have more liberty… more freedom to embellish the levels, because everything that is on the edge of the screen, on the edge of the tracks you’re never going there, so this is why we have a lot of options or a lot of possibility to push the boundary to make it look great for todays platforms that can output more polygons than were possible to do 20 years ago.
We also asked if we could expect a few original tracks in addition to the classic 18. All Gravel had to say on the matter was that they aren’t “announcing anything related to additional content” at the moment. Make of that what you will.
Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled will roar onto PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on June 21, 2019.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.