Franchise: Crash Bandicoot

One early concept for Dr. Neo Cortex was to have him sporadically break the fourth wall and tell the player how unfair he is cast as the villain, the clichés that it presents, and his hopes to break the status quo of the "defeated supervillain" ending.

According to the Willy the Wombat production bible, Dr. Neo Cortex was born in the circus and physically abused by clowns. Since then, anything that involves clowns makes Cortex enraged.

In games like Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled and Crash Team Rumble, Cortex has an unlockable skin in which he is dressed up like a clown. Humorously in Nitro-Fueled, Cortex’s victory animation features him with a dismal glare.

The box arts of Japanese Crash Bandicoot localizations have historically used a redesign for Crash with larger eyes. This has been done for all games except for the "Titans" sub-series, which had its own distinct Crash design, and the Toys for Bob-developed games.

However, the only games that feature the design in-game for the Japanese localizations are the Japanese-developed Crash Boom Bang!, and Crash Tag Team Racing, which had a skin system that allowed Japanese Crash to appear abroad as well. A good chunk of Crash's costumes in Crash Tag Team Racing also got Japanese versions, though these combination costumes were not included in the Western release.

In 2021, information leaked on a cartoon adaptation of the Crash Bandicoot franchise being developed by Eek! the Cat co-creator Bill Kopp for Amazon. The show would have been titled Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Cartoon Show (a name with a similar formatting to that of one of Kopp's previous cartoons, The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show), and would be an episodic slapstick cartoon rather than having an overarching plot. Supposedly, Activision wanted the show to lean more into adult innuendo, while Amazon wanted something more clean, and the straw that broke the camel's back for the series would be a single unspecified joke in an episode about Dr. Cortex transforming into a baby, like in the end of Crash Bandicoot: Warped. According to Kopp, Activision were the ones who aborted the project and not Amazon, though he had no clue what in particular caused the cancellation, but that the experience inspired him to work independently on his next series, Dumb Bunny and Jackass.

Allegedly, Activision also wanted to license Super Mario out for a cameo in a Crash Team Racing-themed episode, something the team found ridiculous and made them believe Activision was not taking the project seriously. The series would have also featured the Land Shark from the cancelled 2010 Crash Team Racing pitch.

Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon have both shared two voice actors. Carlos Alazraqui voiced Crash in a promotional trailer for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Spyro in the original Spyro the Dragon. Jess Harnell voiced Spyro in Spryo: A Hero's Tail and Crash since Crash Tag Team Racing.

According to a later version of the "Project Wombat" developer bible for Crash Bandicoot (this version was given to a fan by the game's producer David Siller in 2015; an earlier version of it was officially published in 2018 in the book "The Crash Bandicoot Files: How Willy the Wombat Sparked Marsupial Mania"), Dr. Neo Cortex's backstory describes how he and Dr. Nitrus Brio when they were younger destroyed their high school by tampering with the physics department's test nuclear power plant. Afterwards, they traveled the world looking for a new home, but no matter where they went they were ridiculed and ostracized, and it is noted that soon after they left a location, that place was then met with "violent explosions and catastrophes". This culminates in one last account where the pair left the city of Chernobyl, drawing the attention of various international law organizations who connected the dots to their past incidents and soon added Cortex and Brio to the international most-wanted list. Feeling the heat, they finally settled down far away from humanity on the Australian island that he would soon name Cortex Island. This backstory heavily implies that Cortex and Brio were responsible for the real-life 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union.

Originally, Nitros Oxide was going to be a human scientist obsessed with speed. This tied into an early plot in which Oxide planned to make the world spin faster and faster until the end of time using a machine called the "X Device". The idea was dropped early on in development and Oxide became an alien set on conquering Earth.

In 2014, a fossil from an extinct species of peramelemorphia (the order which includes bandicoots and bilbies) was officially described and given the scientific name 'Crash bandicoot'. The scientists responsible state in their report that it was named after the video game character, and also in reference to how it was the start of a new lineage of modern bandicoots that 'crashed' through to dominate the ecosystem.

A kart racer was planned to be released along side the cancelled "Crash Landed", the game was being lead by High Impact Games, a studio mostly comprised of former Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games employees. The game would have featured a number of returning characters, including Crash Bandicoot, Dingodile, and the long awaited return of Polar. A new character know simply as "Land Shark" was to be introduced. High Impact Games decided to introduce a dynamic kart modding system, in which the player could equip their character's kart with a number of crazy gadgets, including "Crab Tires" for good speed on sand, "Octopus Tires" to suction onto vertical surfaces, "Pig Engine" to belch their way to first place, and many more wacky gadgets. Unfortunately when Activision made the call to cancel "Crash Landed", the same went for this game.

Naughty Dog decided that the original Crash Bandicoot games would be exclusively released on the PlayStation due to the Saturn not being strong enough for their desires, and they considered developing for the Nintendo 64 would be far too expensive to publish games on due to their cartridge based system.

Toy company Resaurus Toys produced action figures based on the first three games from 1998-2000. Only two series were produced, likely because of their fragility. A third series was planned, but never made it past concept art. It would have included an arctic Crash variant, Koala Kong, Papu-Papu, N. Brio, Pinstripe, and Ripper Roo.

A cancelled game, called "Crash Landed", was in development by Radical Entertainment. It appears it would have been a reboot of the series. The plot was based around Crash trying to save primitive bandicoots (or 'bandicutes' as they were called in the concept art) from Neo Cortex. Dingodile would have served as a secondary antagonist.

The game was cancelled in 2010 after two years of development. After Activision acquired the rights to publish the franchise, they decided to lay off the entire Radical Entertainment studio behind Crash Landed. Activision's decision to not pass the project to a different studio suddenly halted its progress forever.

The name Crash Landed would later be given to the name of a level in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time a decade later, of which according to Toys for Bob's Felix Artifex was intentionally named after the cancelled game.

The character Nina Cortex was created by Traveller's Tales Oxford Studios for Crash Nitro Kart. However, Vicarious Visions was assigned to develop the game instead, so TT-Oxford planned to debut Nina in Twinsanity. However, when screenshots of Crash Fusion (developed by Vicarious Visions) revealed that Nina would appear in that game, TT-Oxford was shocked, as they had not been asked or even notified that their work would be used in another game, which would release even before their own.

After Crash Tag Team Racing was transferred to Radical Entertainment, Traveller's Tales Oxford began working on their own game starring Cortex. They put forth several proposals, but were not given the go-ahead to develop any of them.

Prospective titles were "Cortex Chaos" and "The All-New Cortex Show", and gameplay may have involved him ordering clones or robots around, similar to Pikmin. Cortex would have been kicked out of the Evil Scientist league for "fraternizing" with Crash during the events of Twinsanity, and the other evil doctors, led by N. Tropy, would have been the primary antagonists.

The concept of Trash Bandicoot (now known as Fake Crash) came from some cheap looking knock off Crash Bandicoot dolls. These dolls had huge eye brows and a giant overbite.

According to Andy Gavin, the creator of Crash Bandicoot, Dr. Neo Cortex is based on Brain from Pinky and the Brain.

"I remember it clearly. The four of us were eating at this mediocre Italian near Universal and I had this idea of an evil genius villain with a big head. Obviously brainy cartoon villains have big heads. He was all about his attitude and his minions. Video games need lots of minions. Jason had become very fond of Pinky and the Brain and we imagined a more malevolent Brain with minions like the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A villain, all full of himself, unable to conceive of ever doing anything the simple way, but constantly (in his eyes) betrayed by the incompetence of his henchmen.

I put on my silly villain voice and intoned, "If you had three neurons between you, you couldn't make a triangle!" With this attitude, his name, Doctor Neo Cortex, popped instantly into our heads."

Crash was originally named Willie the Wombat and was created as a much bulkier character. During production of the first game, the marketing director of Universal Interactive Studios insisted that Crash be named "Wez", "Wuzzles" or "Wizzy the Wombat". Crash was given his final name due to his tendency to smash crates.

According to Naughty Dog, Dr. Neo Cortex uses Rogaine, but only on the sides of his head.