The hugely successful Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 forced Sony to produce an alternative for Playstation owners and, at the risk of having blindly loyal Mario Kart fans call for my execution, the result was undoubtedly the superior game unmatched by anything before or since in the karting game genre some 15 years on.ĬTR’s original PS1 Cover. Photo:

I’m talking, of course, about the competition between Crash Bandicoot and Mario.Īfter several releases with not much to separate them, the two went wheel to wheel in the race for supremacy following the release of Crash Team Racing in 1999.

For most, the concept of owning two consoles at this time was a bourgeois pipe-dream so the side you were on was the side you stuck to willing to fight to the death for your chosen hero even if this gesture became slightly empty when repeated resurrections were just a box smash away. Those born post 2000 are likely to have no idea which rivalry provided the backdrop to my early formative years. They probably won’t remember a time when video game discussion was not dominated by the epic battles between PS4 and Xbox One, Battlefield and Call of Duty and, to a lesser extent, Pro Evolution Soccer and FIFA. The youth of today may not remember a time when virtual life was not lived in 1080p when the streets of New York were conveniently covered in a poisonous gas cloud in Spiderman games to avoid tricky animation and the only way to get away from Lara Croft’s irritating butler was to lock him in the walk-in freezer.

Crash team racing ps1 cover