Trivia / Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

• Acting for Two: Brendan O'Brien voiced Crash Bandicoot, Doctor Nitrus Brio, Doctor N. Gin, Komodo Moe and Tiny Tiger. He was only credited for Brio and N. Gin.
• Distanced from Current Events: Weeks before the game was released in Japan, a murder was committed there in which the murderer left only the head and feet of the victim. Because of this, a death animation that involved Crash being pressed down to merely a head and feet had to be made entirely flat in the Japanese release, in fear that the Japanese would find it tasteless due to said real-life murder.
• Dummied Out:
  • Tiny's original name was Taz Tiger. How do we know this? In the American version, they accidentally left this name in the pause menu. Corrected in the European version, as well as all future releases.
  • The green gem path in "Ruination" was originally a 'hard' path, which had a signpost emerging from the abyss marking it as such. The sign still exists internally and can be enabled to function as intended.
  • "Bear Down" has only one gem, but the internal files give its entrance portal an extra gem slot, indicating that it was meant to have two clear gems at some point. Additionally, the gem tower in the game's all-gems ending contains 43 gems instead of the collected 42, including colored gems. The level does contain a secret portal for the alternate entrance of "Air Crash" which allows the player to obtain its box gem, which may be related to the mysterious extra gem.
  • Exploiting the extra items glitch to its fullest will count a clear gem as a colored one but it won't be visibly displayed in the pause menu, presumably it was the orange gem from the prequel.
• First Appearance:
  • For the heroes: Coco Bandicoot and Polar.
  • For the villains: Dr. N. Gin, Komodo Joe and Komodo Moe, and Tiny Tiger.
• The Other Darrin: While Crash and Brio are still voiced by Brendan O'Brien, he's replaced by Clancy Brown in the role of Dr. Cortex, giving a completely different take on the character from Brendan. He would remain the regular voice of Cortex from this game until he himself got replaced by Lex Lang in Crash Twinsanity onward.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tiny Tiger was originally a Tasmanian Tiger named Taz Tiger, but this was scrapped, presumably due to Australia's restriction on the animal's portrayal,
  • In a 2017 Polygon article, Naughty Dog alumni Taylor Kurosaki states that he was working on completely revamping Crash's control scheme for the sequel. He doesn't go into too much detail but he says that "He [Crash] was going to be able to do a lot more different moves...". He mentions that they also planned for there to be a button that would "...turn the camera around, like, the camera was going to be able to completely go 180 [degrees] and be on the other side of the level". All of these plans were scrapped once the team found out that they only had a year's worth of development time to work with.
  • The original pre-release build of Hangin' Out, as showcased at E3 1997, was drastically different to the final retail version. The hanging bars featured heavily and it contained four forked paths, the retail release only had two hanging sections plus one more in the secret area and is the only sewer level in Crash 2 to not contain any split paths.

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