Crash Bandicoot: On the Run!

» see king.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The name Crash Bandicoot means something to almost anybody who was near a PlayStation in the late nineties. The mobile endless runner that carried the name two decades later is a different object, and I never installed it. What makes it worth a grave is the launch, which was one of the largest in mobile gaming, and the ending, which arrived twenty three months after it.

King made it. That is the Candy Crush company, owned by Activision Blizzard, which is also where the Crash license lives, so the deal was internal in everything but paperwork. It was built in Unity and soft launched on Android in Malaysia on 22 April 2020 under the placeholder title Crash Bandicoot Mobile. The worldwide release landed on iOS on 23 March 2021 and on Android two days later.

You ran, and you did not get to choose whether to run. Crash or his sister Coco moved forward automatically while you steered and collected ingredients that got crafted into weapons to throw at bosses pulled from the back catalog. The director, Stephen Jarrett, said publicly that he wanted more exploration than a runner usually allows, and the team went digging through franchise history for obscure characters to put in.

Critics liked how it looked and found it repetitive underneath. The microtransactions took most of the complaints, which for a King game is not news to anybody.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Eight million downloads landed in the first twenty four hours and twenty seven million by the end of the first week. That was the fastest a mobile game had ever been downloaded across the two stores over four days. Sensor Tower put first-week revenue at seven hundred thousand dollars, the second best opening week King had ever recorded, behind Candy Crush Jelly Saga in 2016.

The download geography is worth writing down, because it is not the geography of the original games. The United States led at 2.6 million, roughly 28 percent of the top-eight-market total, with Mexico and Brazil behind it. An NPD analyst credited the phone game with holding up console sales of Crash Bandicoot 4, which had shipped six months earlier.

~ what got buried with it ~

Early in December 2022 the game vanished from both app stores with no announcement attached. Players who asked were told by customer support that it was a temporary issue. On 19 December King published the real answer: the servers would be deactivated on 16 February 2023 and the game would stop working. In-app purchases were switched off that same day, and everybody was told to spend whatever currency they already held before the lights went out.

Everything ran through King's servers, so deactivation was not a delisting. It was a deletion. There was no offline mode to fall back into and no version left on any phone that still did anything at all. Twenty seven million people downloaded it in a week and not one of them owns a copy. That is the standard arrangement for a free mobile game, and it stops sounding standard the moment you write the number down next to it.

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