Sony Pitched A Crash Bandicoot Movie, But It Was Shot Down And Told ‘Video Games Is Like A Toy Business’

Shuji Utsumi, a former vice president of Sony during the mid-90s who later went on to work with Sega, has revealed that he once pitched a Crash Bandicoot movie but was rejected over the notion that video game are basically a ‘toy business.’

Speaking with The Game Business, Utsumi-san, who now serves as COO and president of the Sonic the Hedgehog publisher, revealed that movie studios didn’t take the idea of a video game adaptation seriously at the time.

When I started to get involved in the video game business, I picked up Crash Bandicoot and started asking some of the movie studios if they were interested in turning that property into a movie. But I was treated like… ‘hey, video games is like a toy business’. They didn’t really take it seriously.

If we look at the market back in 1994 — 1996 when Utsumi was with Sony, there wasn’t exactly a great crop of video game outings around that time. Movies like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter were critically mauled, although the 1995 Mortal Kombat film — directed by future Resident Evil movie head honcho, Pau W.S. Anderson — fared a lot better with fans and critics.

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The original Crash Bandicoot was released in 1996 for the PSOne and became something of an unofficial mascot for Sony at the time, and saw two sequels launched for the console over the next few years. The series recently enjoyed a resurgence thanks to the Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time.

[Source – The Game Business via GamesRadar]