Crash Bandicoot, one of the most successful and best-selling videogame franchises in PlayStation history in 1995 continues to set unprecedented industry records, with overall sales of the franchise (including the original Crash Bandicoot and Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back) surpassing the 5 million-unit sales mark worldwide earlier this year. Crash Bandicoot is the first and only PlayStation franchise to have both the original game and its sequel exceed the one million-unit mark in North America.
The first four Crash Bandicoot games were developed by Naughty Dog (Crash 1, Crash 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Crash 3: WARPED and CTR: Crash Team Racing). Crash Bash was developed by Eurocom, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex and Crash Twinsanity were developed by Traveller's Tales, Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure (titled XS in Europe), Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced, Crash Nitro Kart and Crash: Purple (called FUSION in Europe) have all been developed by Vicarious Visions and finally Crash Tag Team Racing was developed by Radical Entertainment. Almost all of the Crash titles were published by Universal Interactive, now called Vivendi Universal.
Even though the games were originally published by Sony for the PlayStation, Vivendi Universal owns the copyrights to the games and characters, which is why multiple developers have worked with the property, and why games have been released for Nintendo and Microsoft consoles.
Most people consider the Naughty Dog games were the best in the series. After that the games have not recieved that much critical hype, aside from the Vicarious Visions games, which did not fare critically as well as the Naughty Dog games, but have still recieved praise from fans due to Vicarious Visions sticking to the Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot formula.
