‘People laughed at it’: the unlikely story behind the music of Crash Bandicoot

For many, the game became the sound of the 90s - but Josh Mancell tells us how the music for PlayStation's first mascot game originated in Kraft cheese and Kraftwerk

When people are playing video games, they want to have fun," Josh Mancell, composer for Naughty Dog's early Crash Bandicoot games, tells me. It's a simple statement, but one that laid the foundations for everything the PlayStation's most famous mascot would come to represent. Even when players were banging their heads against their CRT TVs in frustration as the paranoid, eerie music of Slippery Climb began playing again for the hundredth time, Crash Bandicoot was fun. And Mancell's soundtrack was there, from beginning to end, to remind you of that.

The characteristically eccentric, manic energy that fuelled Crash's madcap platforming adventures didn't come out of nowhere, though. As I was working on the game, I was definitely throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick," Mancell says.