As Leon Kennedy, we fled from a giant, mechanical statue. Eleven years later, we guided Nathan Drake and his brother, Sam, as they escaped from relentless pursuers on a motorbike. And recently, we helped forge a path through a literal wave of plague-infested rats for A Plague Tale’s Amicia. Three examples from literally hundreds of cinematic chase sequences in video games that can all trace their roots back to an unlikely source. The colourful cartoon platformer that started it all: Crash Bandicoot.

The running-towards-camera chase sequence is as popular now as it’s ever been, raising the cinematic tension in blockbuster games for the last 30 years. But its beginnings were humble, and its widespread use is all thanks to the Crash developers at Naughty Dog trying to solve a single problem: How do we show our character’s face more?

From a quick-fix solution to a triple-A staple, this is how an early Crash Bandicoot level inspired decades of cinematic level design.

Boulders is the fourth level in Crash Bandicoot, and takes the average player around 60 seconds to complete. Nestled amongst 31 other levels featuring lengthy side-scrolling gauntlets, tricky platforming, and painful difficulty spikes to overcome, it would be easy to assume that a quick, minute-long chase sequence wouldn’t be a particular highlight. But Boulders was the first of its kind. Any video game sequence where a character is chased towards the camera can trace its origins back to Crash Bandicoot. Perhaps the series it informed the most, though, was Naughty Dog’s own Uncharted series, which features multiple sequences of Nathan Drake running towards the camera across the entire series, as if it were a mandatory part of a Naughty Dog game’s DNA.

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