Everyone's Talking About Crash Bandicoot, But What About Spyro the Dragon?

Their characters looked friendly, their artwork was simple, and their boxes came reassuringly embossed with the words "suitable for ages 3 and up", but the PS1's platform games seemed always to me hard and inaccessible.

Crash Bandicoot was claustrophobic, and punished by death every mistimed jump. Gex: Enter the Gecko was outright frenetic, and designed apparently to short circuit the brain using an onslaught of pure color. Abe's Oddysee was just plain cruel. Whatever mistake you made, it meant instant, bloody demises for both your character and all his friends. And surviving Rayman, its blind leaps and frenzied enemies, demanded near-supernatural ability: only the most prodigious of under-4s ever saw that game's end. The less said about Bubsy 3D the better.

Spryo the Dragon, however, managed to inspire something in me like a sense of abandon. Broad and bright, it delivered what other platformers circa 1997 seemed merely to talk about: a combination of vivaciousness and consideration for the player. I liken Spyro now to a great family film, which neither ruffles nor condescends its variously-aged audience. The game's opening and tone-setting level, called "Artisan's Homeworld," epitomizes this kind of easy appeal.

After you're first handed control of the eponymous Spyro, you've only to guide him a couple of steps forward before the Homeworld proffers a small reward. You're rescuing your dragon friends in short order, starting with Nestor, and with that goal in mind, you're otherwise left to explore the Homeworld at your own leisure. It's sizable.

Given that Spyro the Dragon launched just one month before the first Grand Theft Auto, it's worth noting the Artisan Homeworld is itself a veritable sandbox, not just plainly big but filled with enemies, collectibles and implicit kinds of side-missions.

A treasure chest, perched atop a seemingly insurmountable hill, provides an optional puzzle and challenge. Sheep, which when killed release dragonflies, which in turn allow Spyro to endure extra damage, are the almost equivalent of power-ups or hidden weapons caches. They have visual elements in common, but the Homeworld is also separated into various, distinctive boroughs: a meadow, a hollow and a town square.

In combination, these elements don't exactly leave the impression of a plausible, lived-in place. But as much as it comforts and ingratiates, the Artisan Homeworld also boasts video game clichés which, at the time of its release, belonged most notably to a very adult, edgy new upstart. The size of the Homeworld betrays a more sophisticated game, one you can sink your teeth into. Whether they're on board for a gentle, child-friendly platformer or a substantive, modern video game, Spyro the Dragon's first level suggests there's something for everyone.

I don't like the word, because it's used nowadays to describe basically every game and has become synonymous with twee—but the Artisan Homeworld is also, truly, pretty. It's not so much the colors or the nice, regular shapes in the platforms and the landscape, all of which are admittedly easy on the eye, in a garish, toyshop kind of way. It's the sounds. It's the music and effects that somehow take root in your mind and later in life singularly evoke a certain era. Children's television does this superbly: I can't help suspecting there's a special design board, or kind of neuroscientific recipe the producers use to create ingraining noises, like aural marketing.

That would be quite sinister, doubly so because it works. The buzz of Spyro's dragonfly friend, the belches enemies let out whenever you bop them, even the ambient tingle of the collectible gems—all these sounds are stuck in my head because of the Artisan Homeworld.

Spyro the Dragon's later levels get busier and harder. It becomes more difficult to hear, let alone appreciate, the game's smaller, irresistible noises. The Homeworld, though, is practically serene. As much as it imparts Spyro's and the player's objective, and also the technical ability required to make a big, 3D world, it conveys a certain tone. Rayman opens with a tribal drum beat, then the hair-raising, screechy sound of giant flowers being bent at the neck—Rayman's mischievous titter, which he lets fly every time he finishes a stage, gets right on my nerves. Spyro by contrast sounds affable, pacific. The Artisan Homeworld resonates like Oliver Postgate's voice from the beginning of The Clangers; it serenades you in.

That's what made Spyro the Dragon different. Taken entirely, it could be tricky and recalcitrant as any of its peers. But where those games seemed almost to relish dumping you at the first stage, Spyro, with the Artisan Homeworld, made the effort to be welcoming. With today's games, I can take tutorials for granted. Almost everything released now tells me how to play and what to expect. But on the original PlayStation, even among the allegedly convivial platformers, that kind of hand holding was still rare. Because Spyro's first level so effectively communicates tone and character (as well as mechanics), even today it feels contemporary.