Dan Arey, a former Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog developer who worked on the second and third games in the series, praised the first game in a 1996 Retro Gamer magazine interview. Prior to joining Naughty Dog, he talked about how the game maintained its unique identity in the world of 3D platformers, even when faced with the groundbreaking influence of Super Mario 64. Arey emphasized that while Super Mario 64 embraced open-ended levels, programmer Andy Gavin and director Jason Rubin designed Crash Bandicoot to adhere to a more old-school, level-based structure while adding 3D depth to its platforming challenges by "going down 3D roads with occasional 2D side-wave elements, but everything was very focussed in terms of mechanics". Arey also expressed admiration for the game's technical achievements even before he joined Naughty Dog, which likely soon motivated him to do so:

An early concept for Crash Bandicoot, back when he was originally known as Willy the Wombat, was to have the Cortex Vortex be a surplus of television sets used to brainwash the evolved animals into doing the bidding of Dr. Cortex. After being subjected to the Vortex's media barrage for 7 days and nights, Willy would've been given a tendency to speak and act in a series of bizarre nonsequiters that referenced classic literature, pop culture, or from radio, TV or movies. Some examples would've included "Loose lips, sink ships!", "But brushing with Best Toothpaste gives white, white, white teeth!", and "Don't fire boys, until you see the whites of their eyes!" His demeanor was similar to other hyperactive pop-culture referencing comedy characters from the late 80s and 90s, where he could be quoting from Rambo one moment before switching to Fred Astaire, to John Wayne, and then to Fred Flintstone.

In the opening cutscene, just as Crash starts to break through a window and out of Dr. Cortex's lab, Cortex's model (still in a running animation from the prior scene) can be spotted floating in the air in the far distance for a few frames before vanishing entirely.

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 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.

In the first three Crash Bandicoot games, a glitch can be performed when bouncing on multiple enemies consecutively. Normally, by bouncing on 5 enemies in a row, you get an extra Life in addition to 3 Wumpas from the previous 3 enemies in that combo. However, the bonuses that come from bouncing combos go further beyond that into triple-digit combos as a result of there being no set combo limit. This means if performed correctly, triple-digit combos can overflow the item table to give key items that you are not intended to get through them including Tokens, Crystals, Gems, Sapphires, Relics and Powers.

This can be achieved through tool assistance or through human play by building up the bounce combo on a respawning enemy or more ideally an Iron Arrow Crate, and then continuing the combo on enemies to start reaping these items. Preserving a bounce combo can be done by spinning and crouching right before hitting the ground, as the combo count is lost when Crash enters the standing or walking animations.

The attached image features a list of items that can be earned through this glitch, as well as the requirements for glitched higher percentage runs of each game, created by speedrunners dass and ThaRixer, the latter of whom originally utilized the glitch to dramatically lower the speedrun record of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back in 2012.

Back when the game was still known as "Willie the Wombat", Mark Cerny had commissioned Hanna-Barbera to help give out some ideas and suggestions on what Willie would look like. The aforementioned task was given to an employee of the studio at the time named Butch Hartman, who went on to create a slew of animated series for the children's television network Nickelodeon.

According to director Jason Rubin, Crash Bandicoot utilized a system of dynamic difficulty, making various tweaks based on how well or how poorly the player was doing. Many of these tweaks were made to facilitate more inexperienced players, such as providing more lives and Wumpa Fruit to players running low on lives, giving Aku-Aku Masks after losing 5 lives, and slowing down boulders with each lost life.

In the levels "Cortex Power" and "Toxic Waste", there are two enemies that appear to be genetically-altered gangster potoroos, similar to the boss character, Pinstripe Potoroo. This is unusual as no other genetically-altered animals appear as common enemies in the game.
This also implies that Dr. Cortex created a larger gang of potoroo enforcers, but because Pinstripe has rarely appeared in later installments, this has never been elaborated.

According to developer Andy Gavin, Naughty Dog wanted Crash to animate similarly to the old Looney Tunes cartoons with squash-and-stretch physics. This was achieved with "vertex animation" which allowed 3-4 points of articulation as opposed the more common and stiffer "skeletal animation" which only used single points.

On July 18, 2015, producer David Siller posted a YouTube video depicting never-before-seen versions of the game's intro and ending which were traditionally animated rather than rendered in-game. The former cutscene features a theme song performed by prolific voice actor Jim Cummings, though both the melody and the reprise in the ending are stock music.

In the video's description, Siller stated that these sequences were commissioned by Universal early into development and animated by regular collaborator AKOM in South Korea. However, when Sony was given publishing rights, they demanded that the animations be scrapped in order to better emphasize the PlayStation's 3D graphics. Additionally, Siller stated in the comments section that Universal considered making multimedia adaptations if the game was successful enough, including an animated series based on the scrapped cutscenes and a theme park ride. However, these plans were also abandoned by the time Sony got involved.

During the level "Generator Room", there are multiple monitors that show Dr. Cortex's face. Upon closer inspection, however, the capital "N" on Cortex's forehead is missing.

When coming up with the idea of how the game should play, the developers decided to turn the screen so you would play running in and out rather than left and right. They jokingly call this the "Sonic's Ass" game since you are always looking at Crash's back.

13 years after the release of the game, it was discovered that there is an unused, fully complete level in the code of the game. The level is named "Stormy Ascent", and was removed because of its difficulty. According to Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, the level was designed as an homage to the Castle Wall level in Wizards & Warriors.

Ripper Roo's laugh is a shortened edit of the laugh of a Hyena seen in Disney's 1955 film "Lady and the Tramp".