But according to the original lead programmer, there was one thing Vicarious Visions completely changed…
Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy received mostly positive reviews when it launched in 2017 and marked the first time PlayStation’s beloved marsupial leaped onto PC. However, players have long suspected something was off about Crash’s jumps in the Vicarious Visions remake. There have been many Reddit posts complaining that the platforming segments are noticeably harder than they were during the PlayStation era.
Some say this is due to changes made years ago to Crash’s hitbox, while others noted, when the Trilogy came out, that holding down the X button to jump higher seemed a bit overengineered. That latter suspicion may have been correct if you believe Naughty Dog co-founder and original lead programmer Andrew Gavin. On LinkedIn, Gavin explained that the Trilogy’s awkward jumps are directly tied to the way the original was programmed for PS1.
“The Crash Bandicoot remake was nearly perfect in every way… except for the most important 30 milliseconds. When they reimagined Crash, they nailed the visuals. He looked great, stayed true to the original, and kept the spirit alive. Then they totally messed up how jumping works. On the original PlayStation, the buttons were digital—either pressed or not. Players needed variable jump heights, but only binary input was available. The game would detect when you pressed the jump button: it would start the animation, then measure how long you held the button down. As Crash rose through the air, we subtly adjusted gravity, duration, and force based on your input.
The system interpreted your intent over those 30–60 milliseconds and turned digital input into analog control. Vicarious Visions either didn’t notice this or didn’t consider it important. They eventually realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their fix was to make every jump maximum height. Now, in the remake, every jump feels massive and floaty. The basic jump mechanic feels worse than it did in the 1996 original, despite running on hardware a thousand times more powerful,” Gavin wrote.
In short: Vicarious Visions made jumping truly binary—the exact thing Naughty Dog had spent nearly thirty years trying to avoid…
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