Crash Bandicoot 5 and Phoenix Labs project reportedly canceled

According to a series of posts on X by character designer and illustrator Nicholas Kole, who worked on Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time for Toys for Bob, a fifth Crash Bandicoot game as well as an unnanounced game codenamed “Project Dragon” by Dauntless and Fae Farm developer Phoenix Labs has been cancelled. If Crash Bandicoot 5 had come out, it would have been the first Crash game by Toys for Bob since the studio went independent earlier this year.

Kole starts the thread by eulogising Project Dragon, confirming that all internal efforts to salvage the project have failed. He also hastily notes that Project Dragon has nothing to do with Spyro the Dragon, a franchise which has not received a new entry since the Spyro Reignited Trilogy back in 2018. In a follow-up post, he notes that “some day, folks will hear about the Crash 5 that never was and it’s gonna break hearts“.

WELL. Our cancelled project of the last 3 years is officially, truly dead as of today (internal attempts to save it failed), and the embargo on the whole body of portfolio work has been lifted.

RIP Project Dragon. Brace yourselves for the largest ever art bomb of work I loved 👁️

— Nicholas Kole (@FromHappyRock) July 13, 2024

Although the recent attempts to revive Crash Bandicoot as a platforming franchise with the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot 4 were by all measures a success, the live service multiplayer spin-off Crash Team Rumble struggled to find an audience, and ultimately received its final batch of new content in March 2024, only about 9 months after the game had released. While there has been no formal confirmation from Toys for Bob or Activision, this semi-official announcement that we aren’t getting a proper new Crash Bandicoot platformer anytime soon is quite disappointing.

As for Project Dragon, it had reportedly been in development for over three years based on a new IP. Its cancellation was first announced earlier this year in a LinkedIn post when Phoenix Labs confirmed that a number of employees were laid off and all in-development projects were cancelled. According to Phoenix Labs principal engineer Kris Morness in a LinkedIn post, this round of layoffs and project cancellations was ordered by Forte, the blockchain technology company which acquired Phoenix Labs in 2023.

At any rate, it is disappointing when promising projects are cancelled before they can even see the light of day. We will have to wait and see if more details of these cancelled projects are ever unveiled to the public.