Spyro at 25: Insomniac Games and Toys for Bob celebrate 25 years of Spyro the Dragon

blog.playstation.com:

On September 9 1998, Spyro the Dragon made his mischievous debut on the original PlayStation, capturing the hearts of gamers of all ages. To celebrate 25 years of Spyro, we sat down with both the original developers from Insomniac Games, as well as the team behind the remaster, Spyro Reignited Trilogyat Toys for Bob, to learn how the beloved dragon came to be.

Ted Price, President, Insomniac Games: We had just shipped our first game, Disruptor, and were brainstorming on what to do next. Our longtime partner and producer Mark Cerny pointed out that there was a notable vacuum in the family-friendly market on the PlayStation. Shortly afterward, Craig Stitt who had been creating environment art on Disruptor said, ‘I’ve always wanted to make a game featuring a dragon.’ And we were off to the races.

At the time, 3D platformers were still a relatively new genre, which led to a host of challenges Insomniac needed to tackle.

Brian Hastings, Head of Creative Strategy, Insomniac Games: From a gameplay perspective, our goals initially were just to figure out how to make 3D platforming gameplay work. It sounds straight-forward now, but back then we had never made one before and there were a lot of challenges to figure out. For instance, how to make fast movement work in 3D without giving players motion sickness, how to create intuitive controls in three-dimensional space without an analog stick, how to create platforming and combat challenges without the precise sense of distance you get from 2D, and just generally what kinds of metrics resulted in a fun level design space in 3D.

Many of the lessons learned from developing the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy would go on to influence future Insomniac titles, and aspects of the