Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled creative director Thomas Wilson has revealed the reasons behind the game not receiving a PC port.
During an interview on Canadian Guy Eh’s YouTube channel, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled creative director Thomas Wilson was asked about the lack of a PC version, and whether a port was ever in development. In his response, Wilson said that there was never a plan to work on a PC version of the kart racing game.
The Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled creative director explained that, in order to develop a PC version, a dedicated team is needed. At Beenox, for example, there’s a whole team that handles the PC version of Call of Duty. As per him, it’s a full effort on its own. He recalled the studio’s original plan and budget, saying that it didn’t have the resources to spin up a separate team for PC. Security was also a major concern, with PC games being more vulnerable to cheating, which would’ve required the development team to build systems to prevent it.
On top of that, Wilson mentioned that the Beenox had to consider the potential audience. Its core community was on consoles, and not PC. According to him, the PC crowd can be very vocal, but sometimes that’s just a loud minority. In his view, the cost and effort of developing and supporting a PC version may not have paid off the way people think. He further said that, even though the demand seemed big on the internet, when evaluated based on where the main audience was, a PC version just didn’t make sense for the development team or the budget at the time.
On why anti-gravity segments weren’t brought back for Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Wilson said that, if it was supported, people would probably say, “CTR is copying Mario Kart,” even though the former did it first. Plus, supporting anti-gravity would also have required a lot of development work, such as camera rotation, new physics, and additional engineering support. As such, it was beyond the scope of a remaster.
