Crash Landed is a canceled 3d platformer that was being developed by Renegade Kid in 2008 or 2009 for publisher Activision. It featured Crash Bandicoot, a character originally created by Naughty Dog in the 90’s.
Crash Landed was never officially announced, but thankfully in 2013 Nintendo World Report shared a video of the game on its youtube channel.
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Croc was born as a prototype for a new 3D Mario game with Yoshi as the protagonist:
“The end came when we pitched to do a 3D platform game, the likes of which had never been done before. We mocked up a prototype using Yoshi. It was essentially the world’s first 3D platform game and was obviously a big risk – Nintendo had never let an outside company use their characters before, and weren’t about to, either. This is the moment the deal fell apart. We later made that game into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC, which became our biggest ever game in terms of sales and also in royalties, since we owned the IP.”
Taken from Eurogamer’s article about Argonaut Software
As we can read on Wikipedia, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a 1994 videogame developed and published by Activision in partnership with Redline Games. It was first released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) and Mega-CD (Sega CD) in 1994, followed by releases for the Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, and PC the following year. Hallfiry on Betaarchive forums found some images from a beta version, if you want to write a list of all the differences, leave a message below! :D
Thanks to Stephen Reed for the contribution
Update: as wrote by a former Argonaut Games developer “Hi All… just to let you know this article is false. Croc 3 was never in development at Argonaut (beyond a 2 page proposal I put together) and there was no Spyro demo.“
Original post:
In 2001 during development of Croc 3: Stone Of The Gobbos, Argonaut Games developed a tech demo for an unnamed Spyro The Dragon game. The game was not intended to be released, however it was playable and had a homeworld. The game prototype was done to expand on the engine both Croc 3 and Malice used. It was a tech demo developed for Playstation 2. Nothing else is known.
Thanks to a former Argonaut Games employee for the information.
Croc Legend Of The Gobbos was a platformer game released in 1997 by Defunct game developer, Argonaut Games. Using the BRender engine, which was a state of the art engine capable of powering games released between generations (PS1 and PS2 gens), it took full advantage of the consoles it released on and pushed the game engine to its limits.
Recently, a beta and tech demo was uncovered by a few fans of the game on a now defunct forum, “Croc Fan Forums” , and released to a very few people. A newely formed YouTube channel called “Video Game Beta Book“, posted videos from both builds that leaked a few weeks ago.
These videos show many things that were changed or cut. In the tech demo, croc appears to be voiced by an entirely different voice actor opposed to His voice actor in Croc and Croc 2. Next, many level designs are different, and some levels are even entirely unseen in the final game. The main island also looks severely different.
The tech demo that leaked was dated November 1996, and appears to be a very early alpha of the game engine, that was likely released to internal testers to test physics. In the Prototype dated March 1997, it features slightly different animations, has cut levels, and even has something not at all in the final game: Results Screen. The results screen is similar to the ending of levels on the Spyro The Dragon Trilogy games released by Insomniac Games from 1998-2000, where it shows your gems you picked up and score.
Additionally, in the tech demo Croc is more lighter than He appears in the March 1997 Proto and the final game.
Videos of the tech demo and prototype can be seen below: