Cut and unshipped content

Twinsanity is famous for what is missing from it. The restart burned most of the schedule, funding was reduced partway through, and the ship date did not move - so levels, characters and whole mechanics were removed late, some of them after they were already playable.

This page is a survey of what is known to have been cut, and of what the developers left behind on the retail disc. The second list is the interesting one for modding: those things are still in your ISO.

Before it was Twinsanity: Crash Bandicoot Evolution

The scrapped first version of the project. Its premise - the Evil Twins stealing Crash's island as one piece of a patchwork planet, with an alien ant invasion spreading through the galaxy - was abandoned when Ratchet & Clank arrived with much the same idea.

Bits of it survive in the shipped game if you know to look. The ants became Ant Agony. The Evil Twins kept their name and their treasure. What did not survive was the tone, the scale, and Foofie - an alien sidekick who was to ride on Crash's arm and be used to solve puzzles.

The prototype trail

The community has a fairly precise build timeline, which is unusual for a game of this vintage:

Build	Date	Notable
Evolution prototype, v2.613	6 Feb 2003	One level only: Levels/AIDemos/coop, a test environment. 153 global particles in StartUp/Default.ptl. Debug text throughout the executable.
v8.016	4 Dec 2003	Shown on GameHut. Early Wumpa Island and Jungle Bungle.
"Late February" build	Feb 2004	Contains The Bug Run and High Seas Hi-Jinks.
v8.071	9 Mar 2004
Holiday demo	7 Apr 2004
E3 demo	8 Apr 2004	NTSC-U demo.
Unlimited demo	19 May 2004	PAL demo - still carrying the fallback title.
Press preview	19 Jul 2004
v9.279	30 Jul 2004
Review build	3 Aug 2004

The AIDemos/coop level name in the earliest prototype is a small mystery worth noting: the only level in the February 2003 build sits in a folder called coop.

Cut levels

The Bug Run is the best documented, because Jon Burton showed the prototype on GameHut. It was an optional underground route - reachable through a hole near the worm tutorial - where Crash is chased by bugs, played like the boulder chases of the PS1 games, looping back to a second hole near where you entered. It was cut roughly six months before launch for being too hard.

Gone a Bit Coco is the one the fandom will not let go. Cortex fights through the inside of Coco's mind, a place of cuddly enemies and nonsensical cuteness. It was playable but unfinished - one area polished, with scripted creatures - and was removed very late along with the character Capu Capu, specifically to stop the game crashing.

Others reported cut, in varying states of completeness:

• Rehab Lab
• Security Insanity
• Ocean Commotion
• Krazy Komodo Crash Course
• Wake Me Up Before You Coco
• A harbour bonus level
• An underwater scuba level
• A train / express level
• A hoverboard level

Two of the ten-dimension islands were also dropped.

Cut characters

From Extras\Unseen\ on the retail disc — the developers' own gallery art, not a capture of the game. The folder is named exactly what it sounds like: 48 images of work that did not make it to the screen.

Character	How far it got
Coco as a playable character	Planned as a full member of the party, with "Cyberspace" hacking levels in a Tron / Matrix style.
N. Trance	Modelled and textured; removed over cutscene loading problems.
Evil Coco	Model created, cutscene deleted.
Good Cortex	Possibly modelled; a counterpart to Evil Crash.
Capu Capu	Concept art only; cut alongside Gone a Bit Coco.
Fake Crash	A cameo, dropped.

Cut mechanics

• A scissor kick.
• Controllable hoverboard sequences - the hoverboard survives only as something that happens to you.
• A punch for Crash that destroyed scenery.
• Lightsaber-style weapons, originally conceived as something dropped by defeated ants that Crash could pick up and use.
• The classic 100-Wumpa extra life animation, where the Crash icon floats from the fruit counter to the life counter.

Several cutscenes were also cut that would have explained how N. Tropy, N. Brio and Dingodile each learned about the Evil Twins' treasure - which is why those characters turn up in the finished game already knowing things nobody told them.

The Unseen folder

The disc's Extras gallery has a folder named Unseen, and it holds 48 images. All of them were decoded and catalogued for this wiki, alongside the shipped Enemies and Bosses sets for comparison. Nothing is reused between the sets, so Unseen is genuinely separate work rather than a second copy of the shipped cast.

About half of it reached a finished, textured 3D model. Counting distinct designs rather than files - several entries are variants of one idea - roughly 21 designs got as far as a textured model and roughly 20 stopped at concept, one of them palette-swapped into two variants. Work that reaches a finished model was cut late, after someone had modelled and textured it.

That matters because it is a second line of evidence for the same story as the storyboard distribution, and it does not depend on page counts at all.

Balloon City, from Extras\Unseen\. Not a sketch - a lit, textured, rendered scene of a place that appears in no version of the finished game, hand-dated 16 October 2002, which is inside the window when the project was being restarted. The developers' own gallery art, shipped on the disc.

Some of the rest is worth seeing rather than describing.

Key art, with the ants as the headline threat. Crash and Cortex back to back, hand-lettered logo, and an ant army filling the background. This is the Evolution premise - the alien ant invasion - still being sold as the face of the game.

A cut female bandicoot, finished. Two poses of a completed, textured model - red fur, long black hair, goth dress, fishnets, buckled platform boots. The community identifies this design as Evil Coco, the character the table above lists as modelled but cut. The disc confirms that a design like this reached a finished model; the name comes from the fandom, not from the disc, which captions nothing.

Crash in plate armour. Signed and dated by the artist. One of the roughly twenty designs that never got past concept.

Rideable mounts. Armoured insect riders on a crab and a carapaced beast, both finished models. Five entries in the set are mechanics rather than characters, and this is the most developed of them - something you would have ridden.

A radio-controlled car, lettered "COCO". The clearest surviving trace of Coco's cut role. Whatever this was for, the number plate says whose it was.

Changed rather than cut

Where an Unseen design has a clear counterpart in the shipped game, the idea survived in altered form - the ants (an armoured hierarchy that became the ordinary ones), the tribal warriors (who shipped comic and fat), a plant creature (a flytrap in the end) and a pirate (who shipped as an elephant). These are judgements by eye rather than matches by data. Everything else in the set has no shipped counterpart at all.

Two things that are not on the disc

Worth stating as negatives, because both are the first place a modder would look:

• No cut level survives. The archive has exactly four level folders - AltEarth, Earth, Ice and school. There is nothing for Balloon City or for any of the cut levels listed above.
• The developer level-select list contains no unreleased content. Startup\LevelSelect.txt holds 24 entries and every one of them shipped.
• No cut character survives as a game object either. Searching every level file for the names of the cut cast - TRANCE, CAPU, FAKE_CRASH, EVIL_COCO, GOOD_CORTEX - returns nothing. The only hits are coincidences: every TRANCE is the middle of "CavernEntrance". The cut characters exist as gallery art and nothing else.

The cut levels are real - the developers and the community have documented them - but they were removed from the build, not merely hidden in it. Restoring one is not a matter of finding it.

What is still on the retail disc

This is the part that overlaps with the rest of this wiki. The developers did not strip the build; they stopped referencing things.

• Unused scripts and cutscenes. A number of the game's own state machines are never triggered by anything, and several cutscenes exist in complete form without a path to them. Community members have got some of them running again.
• Unused voice lines, including alternate takes.
• Tips that never appear, inside the Language\AgentLab\ text files.
• An unused Extras image, McDonalds01.psm - a group picture of the bosses, with a texture named bosscomp.
• Cavern Catastrophe has no ambient track at all, where every other level does.
• A Spyro trailer, present on some versions' discs but unreachable in-game - and missing entirely from the PAL PS2 disc. See Versions and regional differences.

There is one more cross-game leftover: a test voice line in the Crash Tag Team Racing demo points at a different version of the birthday cutscene, one that led straight into Mecha-Bandicoot's entrance.

If you want to restore something

Start with Scripts and Cutscenes to understand what a scene is made of, then Level recipes for how to edit one. Restoring an orphaned cutscene means giving it a trigger - the scene data is usually intact; what it has lost is the thing that starts it.

Where to actually see it

Almost none of this survives as text - it survives as screenshots, concept art and video, held by the people who did the archival work. Those images belong to them or to the publisher, so this wiki links to them rather than re-hosting them. If you want to see the cut content, these are the places:

What you want to see	Where
The Bug Run, running, from the prototype	Jon Burton's GameHut channel - he shows the December 2003 build himself
Gone a Bit Coco and the other cut levels	Crash Mania's unused content galleries
Beta screenshots, build by build	Beyond Twinsanity's prototypes section
Cut characters and concept art	Keith Webb's own Crash concept portfolio
Deleted cutscenes	The Deleted Scenes playlist
Unused scripts brought back	Beyond Twinsanity's retail unused-content pages, where community members have got some of them running

Why there are no beta screenshots on this page

Everything in those links is someone else's scan or capture, so linking costs you one click and credits the people who preserved it. The images this wiki does host come from only two places: captures of the modded build on the project's own disc, and a handful of pieces from the disc's own Extras gallery - the developers' artwork, shipped as content.

There are 302 images in that gallery: 161 storyboards, 32 concept pieces, 32 enemies, 16 bosses, 48 under Unseen, 12 in a folder called Test that turns out to hold finished comic-strip illustrations rather than test art, and a promotional group render of the boss cast named McDonalds01. Three of them are reproduced across these pages, which is illustration rather than a mirror of the disc.

Sources

• List of Crash Twinsanity pre-release and unused content - Crash Bandicoot Wiki
• Crash Twinsanity unused content - Crash Mania
• The Bug Run - Crash Mania
• Prototypes and early builds - Beyond Twinsanity
• Unused content, retail game - Beyond Twinsanity
• Crash Twinsanity Development - The Crash Bandi-pedia
• Interview with Keith Webb - Crash Mania