Spyro the Dragon - A History

With the recent announcement of a Spyro the Dragon HD remaster, I thought it would be a great idea to take a look back at everyone's' favourite purple dragon and dig up some history about him and the series. Now I was initially going to do one super long video covering every single Spyro the Dragon game, but I think it would be a lot easier and viewer friendly if I make a video for each title.

In this series, I'm going to talk about the development, story, world, characters, gameplay, music, voice work, and critical reception of each game, so quite a bit to discuss! This particular video covers not only the first game but the birth of the series itself, which means subsequent videos will be shorter as I won't need to mention Spyro's origins after this.

Spyro the Dragon was released for Playstation 1 in Autumn of 1998, developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Mark Cerny, the president of Universal Interactive Studios, wanted a game that not only focused on interaction with enemies, but was also suitable for a wider audience.

During early development, Spyro was actually green rather than the iconic purple we know him to be. However this caused visibility issues as he kept blending into everything. The team experimented with multiple colours for Spyro before they finally settled on purple.

The homeworld, realms and objects also required a lot of thought. Colours were carefully picked to evoke a certain response from players, and it wasn't just a case of going 'let's have blue for a cold realm, and red for a hot realm', as the terrain and architecture had to be taken into account as well.

Spyro 1 starts off with an interview taking place, where two dragons discuss what it's like to live in the Dragon Realms. The conversation moves on to Gnasty Gnorc who reacts in anger and turns all the dragons bar Spyro into crystal, thus becoming the main antagonist of the first game.

Spyro must travel to all 6 Homeworlds and the realms to complete his task. Each Homeworld is named after the dragon clan that inhabits it, bar the sixth which is Gnasty's homeworld. Homeworlds and their realms also contain unique enemies, with a particular level dedicated to and named after a sub-boss. Spyro can travel to and from different homeworlds by way of the balloonists found in each hub.

Spyro the Dragon is pretty basic in its controls, which is fairly understandable given it's aimed at a wider audience that includes kids. X to jump and again to glide, Circle to breathe fire, square to charge, triangle to look around, and L1 and R1 to roll.

As you traverse these realms enemies will try and stop you through various means. A simple charge or flame breath attack will deal with most foes.

Helping you every step of the way is Sparx, Spyro's dragonfly companion. He's basically your health gauge, with three different colours going from gold to blue to green depending on how many times you've been hit.

One of the things I love in particular about the early games is the fantastic progressive-rock themed music. Former drummer of The Police, Stewart Copeland, was very passionate about composing and producing the soundtrack for Spyro the Dragon.

During an interview for Playstation Underground, he talked a bit about his creative process while coming up with the tracks for Spyro the Dragon. Stewart would play through the realm first to get a feel for it, then begin composing snippets of music as he went along.

There are quite a few differences in tracks between each version of the game. For example, while the High Caves realm features the same track for both NTSC and Japanese versions - the Tree Tops' track slowed down - the PAL version uses a complete new track altogether.

The original Spyro the Dragon voice acting wasn't too bad for, at the time, a relatively unknown game, and you may recognise some of the actors who provided the voices. Carlos Alazraqui, Clancy Brown, Michael J. Gough etc.

Though Spyro the Dragon is still incredibly popular even today, the first game didn't immediately get the praise and sales the developers were hoping for on initial release. Many reviewers and critics labelled it a 'kiddy game', implying it wouldn't keep more seasoned players entertained.

When Spyro did finally release in Autumn 1998, sales weren't exactly impressive. While it did do a lot better in Europe than the US in its launch week, Insomniac Games were starting to worry that Spyro would go the same way as Disruptor. Fortunately, as word spread about the plucky little purple dragon sales picked up, and once past the Christmas period Spyro began flying off the shelves. By the time the sequel was set to be released in November 1999, Spyro 1 had sold nearly 2 million copies in the US alone.

To this day the original game holds a 85.44% ranking on GameRankings.com, making it the 4th most popular game in the entire franchise.