(Script + Audio) Titans of Legend Part 4 (Patreon)

Let’s talk a bit about fangames, starting with Spyro- (show list) oh, well that’s unfortunate. Yeah this list kinda speaks for itself, if you were following the progress of any Spyro-related fangame in the 2010s there’s a 99% chance it never saw the light of day. Now as I’m showing this footage you may have noticed a common factor. They’re all attempting to bring back the traditional Insomniac-style gameplay and world design. Which is reasonable, at the time Spyro fans had no way of knowing we’d get a remake that would even give us hope of this return to form. Of course Reignited turned out to be a blessing and a curse for those involved with these fangames, as in 2018 some of them would be forced to shut down at the request of Activision, and others would disappear without an explanation, though most likely out of fear of getting hit with C&Ds themselves.

But of course this is about the impact that the rebooted series had on the community, and in my search for a Legend-inspired game, I was eventually led to this Reddit post by user ViceEmargo:

"For those of you who were maybe unaware the past couple years, despite there being many Spyro fangame creations that have risen and fallen, there was another going on behind the scenes attributing another perspective from the Legend of Spyro series. Some years ago, a man came together with a small development team to form Project Cynder.

For about 2 years they released multiple update videos showing the fair amount of progress they did. This rivaled what many of aspiring developers were trying to accomplish, though their team had the same problem with communication as they did with presentation; releasing updates only every few months until it finally sunk below the dark sea of lost dreams."

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Project Cynder was a very promising fangame that aimed to tell the story of the female dragon’s life before and during the events of A New Beginning (despite footage clearly using her Dawn of the Dragon model but I assume this was just a placeholder). It was being developed in Unity and as the post said received regular updates for around 2 years before being canceled in 2015. The website is no longer operational but fortunately remains archived through the Wayback Machine.

ViceEmargo (after namedropping Project Frixion which we’ll get to in a bit) then goes onto say they were able to get in contact with the lead programmer and actually got a response:

"I'm really sorry but we're no longer working on the Cynder Project. We still have all the files though, and maybe one day, hopefully, we'll take the project back to life. Again, thank you for your efforts and commitment to the project, I hope not to have failed you and the entire community."

Of course, this post is nearly a decade old now so I doubt that day is coming anytime soon.

It really is sad to see just how many of these creators ended up having to abandon their projects for one reason or another, especially when they had so much potential. In fact, at one time I even had hopes to create my own game centered around Cynder. And before you ask, it obviously never went anywhere. This amateur spritework is literally all I have to show for it. As I said earlier I was doing this through Games Factory 2 and I had no idea how it worked.

Ah but game design wasn’t that important to me anyway. No, my real passion was and always will be voice-acting, which brings me to Crash fangames. And Crash Mania just happened to have an entire section dedicated to those.

Now Crash was very much in the same boat as Spyro when it came to fangames, being that most of them were based on the originals up to Twinsanity. Crash Bandicoot TikiQuest was a rare example that actually did incorporate parts of the Titans designs into its spritework. It was also quite interesting in how it played, appearing as an odd mix of Crash and Sonic but making use of mechanics that had previously just been touched on and making them a core part of the gameplay.

Those of you who have been in the fandom for a while are probably familiar with the name JumpButton. You might know him Studio Producer at Summitsphere and one of the lead designers on a little game known as Antonblast. But before that, he was and still is one of the most prominent figures in the Crash fangame community, bringing us the 3-part Crash Bandicoot Energon in 2007, and eventually upgrading to 3D with Crystal’s Wrath in 2013, which was being co-developed by PatStrikesBack. The latter hasn’t received any major progress updates for a few years now, but it’s no surprise there was quite a significant amount of hype surrounding its development, as it too sought to revive the image of classic Crash.

Bringing it back around to the voice-acting thing, when I was about 15 I auditioned for the lead role in a Crash Mania fangame called Virtual Coco, or as it would come to be known, Coco Bandicoot: Digitalized. As you can probably guess it followed Coco as she becomes trapped inside and must traverse through a digital world. It was created by Robert3DG, a well-known artist and 3D programmer on the forum. He even drew this lovely picture of me as a bandicoot.

Unfortunately, much of this game’s information has been lost to time, and all that remains is a screenshot from a random page of the original thread, and these images which I myself had saved from back in the day. I remember being absolutely overjoyed when I got the part as Coco, and would follow this thread religiously until updates slowed down and came to a halt. The last time I heard from Rob was probably somewhere around 2009 when he announced he had stopped working on the game entirely. This was really disheartening for me of course because, hey I was a teenager who thought I’d get my big break as a VA in a cool game. I remember being on another Crash forum with this image as my avatar and underneath it I had written, “I am Coco’s voice” like I was so proud of getting that role. And it wasn’t the first time something like that would happen either.