Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

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Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

Developer(s)	Argonaut Software
Publisher(s)	Fox Interactive
Engine	BRender
Release date(s)	1997
Genre(s)	Platformer
Mode(s)
Platform(s)	PlayStation, Saturn, Windows
Media	1-2 CDs depending on platform
System requirements	Intel Pentium 133 CPU, 32MB RAM, 20MB hard disk, 2MB PCI graphic card
Input	Keyboard or joystick

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (or just Croc) is a video game developed by Argonaut Software and published by Fox Interactive in 1997. Versions of the game were released for Game Boy Color, PlayStation, Saturn, and Windows.

Croc is a third-person, 3D platform game that stars a crocodile named Croc who seeks to save the Gobbos from Baron Dante. The game takes the player to several islands, with his job to find and save as many Gobbos (little furry creatures with big eyes) as possible and defeat the level bosses which occur every half. This is no easy feat though, for Baron Dante has set his henchmen (Dantinis) around every island you visit. They can be dispatched, but only temporarily, with a blow from your tail.

Despite several positive reviews and decent sales with the original becoming a PlayStation Greatest Hits game, Croc only spawned one sequel, Croc 2, that was released in 1999.

However, the Rumors section of Official Playstation Magazine spoke of Croc’s return on the PlayStation 2 sometime near the release of Argonaut Software’s I-Ninja and Malice. The exact month and issue number of the statement is not known at this time.

It is assumed the project was never established due to the age of the magazine and Argonaut Software's closure in 2004, or postponed as a future opportunity for Fox Interactive to rework Croc to be competitive in today’s market dominated by titles like “Jak and Daxter”, “Ratchet and Clank” and “Spyro The Dragon”. A cancelled 2000 Dreamcast port of Croc 2 is among Croc’s other unreleased projects.

Croc's original advertisements pictured him as less cute than he appears in the game or anywhere else, depicting him devouring industries sales rivals Gex, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot and mentioning them as being "delicious" while appearing to have slightly gained weight in his 3-D render after-image, despite the games manual saying he eats "buckets of peas".

A spiritual successor to the Croc series is the Kao the Kangaroo series that began on Dreamcast.

[edit] Saturn rendering bug

This game is notable for a rather severe bug which made its way into production copies. If the game is inserted into the console prior to power-on then certain models (Croc's head and Dantinis, notably) do not display correctly. To circumvent this, the console should be powered on without a CD in the tray and the game inserted after power-on. The bug was caused by a hardware register in the Saturn's rendering chip which is left uninitialized by the game. The Saturn operating system initializes this register if powered on without the CD inserted. This issue was not found during Sega's testing as the special test Saturn consoles are initialised through a boot disk before loading the game under test, which itself initializes the register. Because of the bug the PlayStation and PC version is considered to be superior.