(Script + Audio) Titans of Legend Part 2 (Patreon)

Now we can get into what this video is all about… the community. As previously mentioned, social media during this time was just starting to go mainstream, and the online world was a very different place than it is now. Other than DeviantART a majority of my days were spent on a variety of forums.

Crash Mania would quickly become one of my favorite hangout spots after re-familiarizing myself with the franchise. I remember going through the character pages on the main site and looking at how all of them changed over the years, and just being so excited to engage in conversation with the fanbase about these new games and even the older ones. I would quickly learn that the former was not viewed in a very positive light.

Despite that divide though, I managed to somehow avoid being met with too much hostility for my opinions during my time as a forum member. By the way, in case anyone’s curious, I went by Bunnee/Usagi Yuki and had a picture of my OC as my avatar. Smaz even says he remembers me from back then which is just surreal.

Oddly enough I don’t remember hanging around any Spyro boards like Spyro Forum or DarkSpyro, but those are still around today, even if they aren’t updated frequently. Just goes to show how much my bias affected me.

I was at that age where I wanted everyone to think I was cool and talented so I often tried to involve myself in a lot of discussions and projects. This included posting fanart and of course my own characters, making low-quality music videos, convincing myself I knew how Games Factory 2 worked, and constantly asking people if they needed a voice actress for whatever they were working on (which is honestly something I still do now). I’ll come back to that as well because it’s pretty important.

One of the many methods for marketing this new era would come in the form of Crash Village and Spyro’s Lair, MMO-style browser games that were the face of each respective website from 2007 to around 2009, although some sources say the former was still running until 2011.

The main gimmick of these sites was creating your own edgy dragon OC or mutant abomination, chatting and spamming emotes to other players, and playing a variety of minigames. I honestly have no memories of actually doing anything on either site, but I do still have these screenshots of the characters I created from back in the day.

Both are now considered partially lost media, but they remain strong in the memories of those who had the privilege of playing them in their hayday.

Before we move on, something else I came across was this weird cross-promotion with Act II popcorn of all things. Not only did they make a complete back-to-school kit to promote A New Beginning and Crash Boom Bang (hilariously), but also a browser game called Crash & Spyro Launch. It plays like any other, collect stuff to get a high score and progress to the next level. But the funniest part is the “stories” they came up with for why you’re even doing any of this. For Crash, he’s just been locked in an evil temple. No mention of who it belongs to or who locked him in there, he’s just in an evil temple. But for Spyro, he’s been imprisoned in a strange realm deep within the Land of the Gnorcs. Not Apes, or any of the enemies from the Legend series… Gnorcs. Whoever made this definitely just saw there were new entries to each franchise and looked up some basic information on the first games. Very “I used to play that when I was a kid”.