The first spin-off of the Crash Bandicoot series, as well as the last game of the series developed by Naughty Dog. A Mascot Racer heavily inspired by Mario Kart, and also drawing several elements from Diddy Kong Racing, CTR is often considered to be the best kart racing game on the original Sony PlayStation, if not the entire fifth generation of consoles, though its soundtrack typically isn't viewed with as much praise.

An intergalactic visitor called Nitros Oxide arrives on Earth to challenge the world's fastest racers in a grand prix. Eight characters — each one with unique abilities and under the command of either Aku Aku or Uka Uka — will participate in races and win enough trophies to challenge him or else Oxide will turn the entire planet into a large concrete parking lot and enslave all its inhabitants. Also, other characters want to defeat Oxide on their own and will not tolerate any disturbances in their way.

The game has a Diddy Kong Racing styled 1-player adventure mode; most levels have one of each of these items to get:

• Trophies: For winning a vanilla race.
• CTR tokens: Remember the Silver Coin Challenges in Diddy Kong Racing? Well, they're back, but you only need to get 3 letters in each race this time.
• Relics: Similar to Crash 3, the courses are littered with time-stopping crates. Break all the crates (if you can) for 10-second subtraction from your final time. Finish 3 laps with a good time for a sapphire or gold relic. Or platinum.
• There's also bosses (though unlike the ones in Diddy Kong Racing, they're not giant, and they race you in basic karts) and multi-race cups through the adventure, and the battle arenas are converted into contests where you have to get all the crystals in the arena before running out of time (which is cut if you hit a Nitro crate).

The game's roster consists of:

• Starting characters: Crash Bandicoot, Dr. Neo Cortex, Tiny Tiger, Coco Bandicoot, Dr. N. Gin, Dingodile, Polar, Pura.
• Bosses: Ripper Roo, Papu Papu, Komodo Joe, Pinstripe Potoroo, Nitros Oxide^note Oxide is unplayable outside of hacks.
• Other secret characters: Fake Crash, Dr. N. Tropy, Penta Penguin.

The game's track selection:

• N. Sanity Beach: Crash Cove, Roo's Tubes, Mystery Caves, Sewer Speedway
• The Lost Ruins: Coco Park, Tiger Temple, Papu's Pyramid, Dingo Canyon
• Glacier Park: Blizzard Bluff, Dragon Mines, Polar Pass, Tiny Arena
• Citadel City: N. Gin Labs, Cortex Castle, Hot Air Skyway, Oxide Station
• Gem Stone Valley: Slide Coliseum, Turbo Track

This was followed by two indirect sequels in the sixth generation of consoles, 2003's Crash Nitro Kart and 2005's Crash Tag Team Racing, though different developers made these and recieved a mixed/mildly positive reception. Naughty Dog made their own Darker and Edgier Spiritual Successor in 2005: Jak X: Combat Racing, a well-received spin-off of the Jak and Daxter series.

With the success of the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy remaster, the original Crash Team Racing would receive similar treatment by the developer Beenox for Activision, under the title Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. Like the N. Sane Trilogy before it, Nitro-Fueled is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, released on June 21, 2019.

Tropes used in this game:

• 100% Completion:
  • You have to complete all the tracks, get all the CTR tokens, all of the relics (including platinum!) and defeat all of Oxide's ghosts in time trial. Beating all of Oxide's ghosts unlocks the scrapbook for the main menu that is otherwise only seen when you complete Adventure Mode (or enter a code).
  • In the Adventure mode, you must get all the trophies and beat all the bosses to race Oxide a first time, then get all the CTR tokens and win a relic on every track (sapphire is fine), then beat Oxide again for 100% and the Scrapbook.
• Abandoned Mine: The Dragon Mines, which serves as Komodo Joe's home track. There exist minecarts that serve as obstacles.
• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: A speed-obsessed alien named Nitros Oxide challenges Earth's best racers to compete with him for the fate of the planet. If he wins, he plans to turn Earth into a giant parking lot and enslave its inhabitants.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Sewer Speedway is a track located in the same sewer network as that of several Crash 2 levels, with pipes at least ten storeys tall that are raced in.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Nitros Oxide, who wants to turn Earth into a giant parking lot and enslave all its inhabitants.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When your racer is on the last place or second to the last place position and gets a pick-up crate, there is a huge chance of your racer obtaining either Warp Orb or N. Tropy Clock.
  • N. Tropy Clock is only available to player racer(s), not to AI racers. If the race is on multiplayer mode, one only need to worry about human rivals obtaining one, as AI enemies cannot have it.
  • When someone activates either Warp Orb or Tracking Missile, a crosshair symbol will appear to signal how close your racer is from getting hit, which allows you to get ready.
• Arrange Mode:
  • The "CTR Challenges" have you race in the tracks with other characters, but you also have to collect C, T, and R letters placed in different parts of the road in addition to coming at 1st place.
  • The "Relic Race" is similar to Time Trial, but with a finite number of time crates around that you can break to stop the timer momentarily.
• Ash Face:
  • In the game's opening cutscene, Dingodile is tinkering with one of the exhaust pipes of his kart when the vehicle suddenly backfires, covering his head and all of his front in ash.
  • Getting burnt by any obstacles in the course only results in spinning out for a moment before shaking off the soot.
• Astral Finale: The final boss race with Oxide takes place in his track, Oxide Station, which is situated in space just off the Earth.
• Athletic Arena Level: Tiny Arena is a Wario Stadium Expy with all you can expect from it: the track is made of dirt, surrounded by big walls, it happens on night, and it's on the podium of the longest tracks of the game.
• Badass Adorable: Penta Penguin in the European/Australian version: he's a cute little penguin with maxed out stats across the board.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Oxide states that if he wins, he will turn Earth into a giant concrete parking lot. Obviously he doesn't, but Battle Mode provides a hypothetical "What If?" scenario by naming one of the unlockable areas Parking Lot.
• Balance Buff: In the European/Australian version of the game, Penta Penguin may have "perfect stats" all round, but Mighty Glacier computers playing against them will have a slightly better top speed to give the player some competition.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: "Balanced" Characters are "balanced" (in reality they have poor acceleration, poor speed, and the second best turning), "Acceleration" Characters have high acceleration, subpar turning (only better than a Speed character), and the second highest top speed, "Speed" Characters have high top speed, but poor turning and acceleration, and "Turning" characters have poor top speed, subpar acceleration, but the best turning. It could be considered, in order - Balance, Skill, Power, and Gimmick (as its competitors at the time only had 3 classes, so a turning class is unique to CTR).
• Barehanded Bar Bending: In the Adventure Mode's character selection, Tiny Tiger is effortlessly juggling a barbell around. If you select him, he'll bend the barbell into right angles.
• Big Fancy Castle: Cortex Castle, the battle map Nitro Court, and the hub world Citadel City.
• Boss Rush: An interesting example. For the Purple Gem cup, you have to race against all four bosses at the same time.
• Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: Your friendly mask spirit (Aku Aku for the good guys and Uka Uka for the baddies) will save you from bottomless pits.
• The Bus Came Back: The first four bosses (not counting Oxide as he's new to this game) return for this one after being absent for a game or two; specifically, Papu Papu and Pinstripe from the first game and Ripper Roo and Komodo Joe from Cortex Strikes Back.
• Canon Immigrant: Penta Penguin originated from a Crash Bandicoot manga.
• Chase-Scene Obstacle Course: Players can drop trap-type obstacles that obstruct/slow down other racers.
• Cheat Code: There are codes that unlock all of the unlockable racers (including N. Tropy), give unlimited Wumpa Fruit, automatic and unlimited turbo, automatic weapon gain (without breaking crates), unlocking the scrapbook (you need to 100% the Adventure mode normally to see it and beat Oxide's ghost on every track to unlock it on the menu), etc. Those that modify the gameplay can be used in Adventure, too, but you will need to open the 'New/Load' screen before the codes will work.
• Citadel City: The fourth Hub Level is the Trope Namer. It resembles a fortified medieval village.
• Civilization Destroyer: Unused dialogue shows that Nitros Oxide was the reason there's no life on Mars. There was, until Oxide showed up, challenged them to a racing competition, and won.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Crash's kart is blue, while Cortex is red, Coco is pink, N. Gin is violet, Tiny and Oxide are green, Dingodile is olive, Polar is aqua, Pura is indigo, Ripper Roo is orange, Papu Papu is yellow, Komodo Joe is mustard, Pinstripe is black, Fake Crash is slate, N. Tropy is cyan, and Penta is white.
• Comeback Mechanic: These weapons appear in more frequency if you're in the last (8th) place or close to it.
  • Warp Orbs, which hits the player in first place (and all players ahead of you when it's juiced up).
  • The clock weapon, which slows down all other players when it's used.
  • And the Aku-Aku/Uka-Uka mask, which provides increased speed and invulnerability for a short time, as well as able to knock over other karts by colliding into them.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The bosses in Adventure mode have infinite items (of the trap variety, and they are laid CONSTANTLY, though one uses the rolling bombs). Oxide starts the race before the green light! He even laughs at you as he does this.
  • Oxide is also resistant to traps and missiles, merely spinning out just like when hit with the chemicals rather than tumbling like with the TNT and Nitro; he only tumbles if you hit him twice.
  • It's implied that the bosses sans Oxide are cheating bastards because Oxide is an even bigger bastard than the other four; they have to make sure that you'll be up and prepared against Oxide's dirty tricks. Evidenced in the Purple Gem Cup where they race together with you normally with the same rules as a normal enemy racer.
  • A subtle one for the main bosses: aside from the Purple Gem cup - where they run off their normal stats - all of the bosses will gain a speed boost if behind you no matter which racer you choose. Thus Komodo Joe and Pinstripe, who have speeds equal to Crash or Coco, will also be able to easily catch up to Tiny and Dingodile. Part of the challenge is having to be neck and neck with them the whole way, even if you chose a racer whose speeds should ideally blow them out of the water.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Contrary to what the in-game stats tell you, "Balanced" characters are not faster than Acceleration characters. As the datamined stats indicate (noted on the game's wiki👁 Image
  ), Acceleration characters actually have a higher speed value than Balanced characters, and thus have higher stats than the latter in all but turning.
• Confetti Drop: This happens every time you get on the podium after winning a race.
• Cool Gate: The way to enter race levels in Adventure Mode is by driving onto a shining warp pod on the ground, which sucks the racer into it. The "boss garages" are also cool in their own ways, especially Oxide's.
• Cool Key: The rewards for beating bosses are keys that you'll need to open later areas of Adventure Mode and, in the end, the way to Oxide's boss race.
• Crosshair Aware: If you're being targeted by a missile or Warp Orb, there's a crosshair on your back that alerts you.
• Crutch Character: Polar, Pura, Ripper Roo, and Penta Penguin (in the American version). They have good handling, but have inadequate top speed. As such, they are extremely slow initially, and they are not the quickest accelerators either, but they can make turns without slowing down that require faster characters to powerslide or brake, and thus are the best options for learning how to handle the more complex maps.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Going into Crash Team Racing expecting Mario Kart-style short hops before initiating a drift. Due to the height gained with a hop being much higher than in any of the Mario Kart games (not counting Double Dash!!), there's a bit more of a delay before you actually start drifting.
• Dancing Mook Credits: At the end, characters dance next to the credit roll.
• Dangerous Clifftop Road: The Dingo Canyon track is set at the top of a cliff, as is Polar Pass.
• Deadly Force Field: The powershield power-up can be either used as a forcefield to negate one attack or attack another player by touching them, or launched ahead to attack another player in front of you.
• Death Mountain: Dingo Canyon, and the battle map Rocky Road, are set in a Stock Desert Interstate.
• Deflector Shields: The bubble shield weapon you can take from the crates. They can protect you once from any attack, you can knock another racer off their wheels when you collide into one, and you can also launch them forward as a projectile attack. Normally if nothing happens to the shields they'll dissipate after a time passes, but when juiced up, they'll remain up indefinitely (unless, again, something happens to the shield and it's used up). The Aku Aku/Uka Uka masks also function as this, on top of boosting your speed.
• Deliberately Jumping the Gun: The Final Boss starts driving before the final light.
• Difficult, but Awesome: "Ultra Sacred Fire", the highest tier of boost in the game, can only be acquired from specific Boost Pads on a few of the tracks.^note Those being Polar Pass, Cortex Castle, N.Gin Labs, Hot Air Skyway, Oxide Station and Turbo Track Unlike in the Nitro-Fueled remake, getting a boost from any other source will overwrite USF, meaning that to take advantage of it you have to avoid all Boost Pads, boost landings, and cannot use Power Slide Turbos... while going the fastest in the game with a huge turning circle. But if you can pull it off, nobody will be able to touch you.
• Double Unlock: To get to race Oxide for a second time and beat the game, all you have to do is beat the time trials on every course. Easy, right? Well, that includes a track that's only unlockable if you collect all five gems. How do you get those? Beat a cup race, four races in a row for one gem. How do you unlock those? Collect 4 tokens of the cup's respective color by beating races while collecting all 3 letters around the course or, for the purple tokens, by going into the arena levels and collecting all the crystals before time runs out.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: The AI works on a principle like this, where it is much more aggressive in the first two laps but then dials itself back and uses less items in the final one, to make the early parts of the race much more hectic and challenging but still give you a fair chance at winning.
• Down the Drain: In Sewer Speedway, racers drive along a large drain while avoiding giant barrels.
• Duel Boss: The player races against bosses in one-on-one challenges. Said bosses spam traps against the player. And in Nitros Oxide's case, jumping the green light.
• Dynamic Loading: The game uses the Winding Corridor variant between hub areas. For the most part it's pretty seamless, but there are a couple of places where the textures in the corridor change slightly once the next hub loads, and in at least one spot it's possible to park with your kart angled in such a way that you're able to see that the corridor you're heading down has nothing at the other end.
• Easy Level Trick: In the form of shortcuts. Some are intentional (e.g Crash Cove, Tiger Temple, Cortex Castle), a few others are not (e.g Oxide Station), and some have shortcuts of both varieties. Hot Air Skyway, in fact, has four shortcuts. The first is the obvious and only intentional shortcut branching to the right of the normal track when you jump off the first ramp. The second (jumping the barrier midway through the level) - the first unintentional one - is relatively simple. The third is almost Rainbow Road-esque, involving turning around and jumping to a lower layer. The fourth is just about impossible to non-competitive gamers, and involves jumping from the last ramp straight to the finish line. Demonstrated at full in this video👁 Image
  .
• Enemy Mine: Everybody teams up against Oxide to save the world; most of the playable roster is made up of bosses from the previous games, in fact. That said, they are competing to be the one who races Oxide. Even the bosses (except for Oxide, of course) are really on your side and are essentially sparring partners. Their job is to make sure that Earth's champion is actually capable of defeating Oxide, because the entire planet loses if the champion loses.
• Expy:
  • In the form of racetracks, some of which are similar to ones from Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing. Crash Cove is one to Koopa Troopa Beach and Crescent Island, Coco Park is one to Luigi Raceway and Royal Raceway, and Tiny Arena is one to Wario Stadium.
  • While the weapons differ from Mario Kart items, some of their uses are very similar: the Brio Beaker is an immobile trap like the Banana Peel, the Missile attacks the racer in front of the thrower like the Red Shell, etc.
• Flawless Victory: Getting all the time-freezing crates in a time trial rewards a 10 second deduction from your final time. Quite often, this is necessary due to the ridiculous Platinum Relic times.
• Fragile Speedster: Coco, N. Gin, and Pinstripe all are high-acceleration karts. Because of this, they reach their top speeds (which is only second to that of Tiny, Dingodile, Papu Papu, and N. Tropy despite the game's stat display saying otherwise) more quickly and recover from hits more quickly as well. However, their karts handle worse than those of balanced characters.
• The Ghost: Downplayed; the Brio Beaker item is named after Dr. N. Brio according to the instruction manual, yet he is nowhere to be seen in the game.
• Gang Up on the Human: Played with. The AI has a specific behavior that makes cars ahead of you target each other with projectiles — the idea is this is to make it easier for you to pass by while they are taking each other out. They also juggle their aggressiveness, becoming much more aggressive in the second lap and much less aggressive in the final one, which they do by changing priorities from "everyone equally" (lap 1) to "prioritize the player" (lap 2) to "prioritize each other" (lap 3) — this is to put the screws to the player in the second lap and make them work hard to hold the lead, but then back off and make a first-place victory plausible.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Justified in the Adventure mode by way of Enemy Mine. In order to see who is capable of representing their world in the race against Oxide, many of Cortex's allies and evolved animals from the original trilogy join in the race alongside Crash and the rest of the heroes, either by being one half of the main starting roster or serving as your opponent in the boss races that cap off each world.
• Goomba Stomp: You can crush enemy cars, flattening and slowing them down for a few seconds, by hitting them with your upraised front when you get a full speed boost.
• Graceful Loser:
  • N. Tropy when you beat him in all the Time Trials.
  • Downplayed with the bosses. While they accept defeat and give you their key, they still think you're not good enough to defeat Oxide. Komodo Joe's parting words are particularly full of vitrol.
    Komodo Joe: You're not so sssslow after all. Ssssurprised me you did. Sssstill, I don't think you're fast enough to defeat Oxide. We're going to lose our planet, and it'll be all your fault.
• Guide Dang It!: Some crates in Relic Race and letters in CTR Challenge placed on shortcuts seem out of reach on certain tracks, with no obvious way to get to them, though this can be averted when observing Oxide's ghost in Time Trial.
• Handy Shortcoming:
  • The advanced class of racers have high top speed, average acceleration, and low handling, and thus have to rely on power-sliding to take pretty much any corner. However, power-sliding gives three opportunities per slide to get a turbo boost. Power-sliding is easier to do with bad handling, which allows for more opportunities for boosts and can even be used on a straightaway by waggling left and right — good luck doing that as a car with good handling without going off the track. Thus, the biggest shortcoming of the advanced class only serves to make them even faster than they already are.
  • The beginner class of racers meanwhile have low top speed, decent acceleration, and good handling, which generally makes them the worst racers since power-sliding with the already faster other classes, who are already faster than the beginner class by default, also get more turbo boost opportunities. However in battle mode, the beginner class's poor top speed makes them extremely effective as the faster cars struggle to line up a shot from behind without overtaking them: just stomp the brake or turn away, let them pass you, and then counter-attack.
• Hidden Mechanic: To compete at a high level, you need to learn how to manage your boost reserves and know how to obtain and maintain various levels of turbo. The game tells you nothing about this with even the in-game hint system only vaguely alluding to the benefits of chaining turbos together and the turbo visuals not being much help beyond denoting how big the turbo you have currently is. This is softened up a bit in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled by revamping the visuals of the turbo SFX to make the different reserves and strengths of turbo more readily apparent through the size and color of the flames with striking blue flames being introduced as an indicator for achieving the maximum boost, making finding the areas where you get it and knowing if you're maintaining it much less of a hassle.
• Home Stage: With only a few exceptions^note Mystery Caves, Sewer Speedway, Blizzard Bluff, Slide Colosseum, and Turbo Track, every stage in the game is named after one of the playable characters (Crash Cove, Roo's Tubes, Coco Park, etc) and serves as their home stage. An added Meaningful Background Event is that if you are not playing said character, the AI racer who is put in first at the starting line will be said corresponding character. Hot Air Skyway and Dragon Mines are the two exceptions to be home stages that are not named after their characters (Pinstripe and Komodo Joe, respectively), unless you count Blizzard Bluff serving as Penta Penguin's home stage.
• Homing Projectile:
  • The Missile weapon will track the opponent in front of you, provided that you don't fire it from too far away. When juiced up, it gets better tracking capability and travels much faster.
  • The Warp Orb is one for the leading racer, bowling over by other racer it passes by, and as such a racer can only get it if they're lagging behind. When juiced up, the ball will actively target every other racer between the launcher and the first placer.
• Hub Level: The Adventure Mode is a large track divided in five zones.
• Invincibility Power-Up: The masks function just like the Mario Kart Super Star. Which mask you get depends on what characters you choose (good guys like Crash and Coco get Aku Aku, while bad guys like Cortex and Tiny get Uka Uka).
• Invisibility: One Battle mode-only weapon lets the user become invisible for a time. Only their wheels can be seen by the controlling user during this state.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Despite what the games shows, the "balanced" characters actually are Masters of None due to having low speed and acceleration stats.
  • On a more advanced level, acceleration based characters fit this trope better, as they actually have a good speed and their low handling is good to train on drifts and turbos, making them a good entrance for speed based characters.
• Land, Sea, Sky: Ripper Roo is raced in a Shark Tunnel (sea), Papu Papu in a temple and Komodo Joe in a mine (land), and Pinstripe on a floating circuit (sky).
• Last Lousy Point: There's a Last Lousy Relic. You need all the relics for a rematch against Big Bad Nitrous Oxide, but to get the last relic you need to unlock a secret race, which requires 5 gems. Each gem in turn requires 4 CTR tokens and then a win in a four race tournament. The tokens and gems do count toward completion percentage, though. There's also the Oxide time trials. You don't even get Oxide for beating all of them, just a shortcut to the scrapbook.
• Left It In: In the original North American release of the game, the secret unlockable character Penta Penguin's voice lines are mostly made up of realistic penguin sounds - aside from the placeholder lines recorded by programmer Gavin James that were accidentally left in, which has the little penguin say "Penguin yay 1," "Penguin yay 2," etc. in a flat, bored sounding tone. This was thankfully fixed in the European and Japanese releases.
• Lethal Lava Land: Mystery Caves, which features giant fireballs that emerge from chasms at regular intervals.
• Level in Boss Clothing: The boss races are simply one-on-one races on a normal track, the only real gameplay addition being the opponent having unlimited items.
• Levels Take Flight: Hot Air Skyway is a floating track held up by Cortex's blimps.
• Locked Door: The Adventure Mode has doors on The Overworld that leads to other adventure maps, but in order to open them, you have to beat the boss race in the map to get the boss key. Some doors will only open with more than one key, including the door to the Final Boss race with Nitros Oxide, which requires all 4 keys.
• Mad Scientist Laboratory: N. Gin Labs, and the unlockable battle map Lab Basement.
• Magikarp Power: Polar and Pura initially start out as this, in Adventure Mode. Their karts do not have much in the way of top speed, and power sliding in a straight line is a troublesome task for them. After Papu Papu's boss fight is when tracks turn out more favorably for the handling-centric karts and the game gives myriad opportunities for them to come out on top. Notably, tracks such as Dragon Mines and Hot Air Skyway are turning-centric. While they would normally be difficult for someone without stellar handling, Polar and Pura have karts which make those tracks a breeze for them.
• Man-Eating Plant: Stationary man-eating plants appear as hazards on Papu's Pyramid, although the worst you suffer from them is lots of lost time.
• Marathon Level: Tiny Arena and Oxide Station are the longest tracks in the game.
• Mask of Power: Aku Aku and Uka Uka act as temporary barriers for the cast depending on their alignment.
• Master of All: In the European/Austarlian version, the cheat-only character Penta Penguin has perfect scores in all stats. When it comes to the race itself, though, he's often tiered lower than the high-speed-low-handling characters, due to how power-sliding works.
• Master of None: Despite being presented as well-rounded in all areas, Crash, Cortex, Fake Crash, and Komodo Joe all ultimately fall into this: despite the game saying they have decent speed and acceleration, they're actually outclassed in speed by Acceleration characters and acceleration by the Turning characters (despite the game saying otherwise in both cases), leaving their one definitively good stat as handling, which isn't particularly useful in the earlier courses due to it ensuring they have trouble drifting in a straight line consistently and only sees some use in the later, harder courses.
• Mayincatec: Papu's Pyramid. Also the battle map Rampage Ruins and the hub world both tracks are placed in, The Lost Ruins. To some extent, Tiger Temple.
• Meta Power-Up: The Wumpa Fruits are used to increase your max speed and, when you reach 10, upgrades all of your acquired weapons.
• Mighty Glacier: Tiny, Dingodile, Papu Papu, and N. Tropy endure slow acceleration and the worst handling, but the best top speed: once power-sliding is mastered, those guys can remain on their top speed the whole race, trivialize turns, and even, thanks to the low handling stat, powerslide in straight lines and chain drift boosts without losing time.
• Missing Secret: Nitros Oxide was originally meant to be playable, but was scrapped due to time constraints. He can be used via Game Shark and even has dialogue unique to being driven by the player that otherwise goes unused, but his large kart makes it very difficult to see the track and he will crash the game if used in multiplayer due to his large model causing a memory overflow. The intended means to unlock him in the game, the Purple Gem Cup, is still there, but beating it instead unlocks Joke Character Fake Crash instead. He was restored in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled with a smaller kart and full multiplayer functionality.
• Moveset Clone: Characters are paired up by skill: Crash and Cortex (balanced), Coco and N.Gin (best acceleration), Tiny and Dingodile (best top speed) and Pura and Polar (best handling).
• Moving the Goalposts: Zigzagged; When Oxide arrives, he says that he'll leave Earth alone if he's beaten in the big race. Once you do, he relents and says that Earth gets to stay "all gushy and green"... but then claims that he won't leave until you gather up all his Time Relics and beat him again to prove that you're "the fastest in the Universe". As it so happens, getting all 18 Time Relics basically means you have to 100% the game! This can be subverted by the player however if they go for 100% completion before taking Oxide on the first time, causing Oxide to leave right away after his defeat.
• Multiplayer-Only Item: The Invisibility and the Super Engine are only available in the multiplayer battle arena. There's also a Dummied Out but fully functional spring item, which just makes you just jump and likely would have been exclusive to battle mode too.invoked
• My Nayme Is: Nitros Oxide (as opposed to "nitrous oxide").
• Nitro Boost: The sliding boost mechanic can give the racers additional speed boosts while sliding. There are speed-up pads on many sections of the track, usually for crossing gaps. You can also acquire the Turbo and Super Engine weapons, both of which gives you a free boost, with Super Engine giving up much more (but is only available in Battle mode plays). The Aku Aku/Uka Uka masks also functions as this, on top of making you invincible.
• Non-Fatal Explosions: No matter how many Nitros, chemicals, TNTs, bombs, missiles, or warp-balls (that work like the spiny shell in Mario Kart) the racers get hit with, the worst they get is a tumbling and then they always eventually land wheels-down to continue.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: The game breaks its characters down into categories of Beginner (the slow characters with good handling), Intermediate (the balanced characters and the good accelerators with poor handling) and Advanced (the fast characters with poor handling and acceleration). However, "easy to control" doesn't translate to "easy to use" in this game because getting turbo boosts from power sliding is the way to speed up and the already faster characters are more effective at it than the ones with good handling, leaving those characters as simply too slow to catch up. How it really breaks down is Intermediate = Easy, Advanced = Medium, and Beginner = Hard.
• Non-Indicative Name: Unlike the next kart-racing game, there's no team mechanic or presentation in this game.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Whenever a kart falls into a pit, Aku Aku/Uka Uka will lift them back up.
• Nostalgia Level: Many levels are straightforward homages to settings from the original trilogy. A few examples: Blizzard Bluff is one to the snow forest levels in Cortex Strikes Back, Polar Pass to the snow and ice levels of the same game, Tiger Temple to the dark ruins levels of the first two games, and N. Gin Labs to the lab levels in the very first game.
• Not Just a Tournament: In the intro for the game, as well as all modes besides the Adventure mode, the cast just races for the fun of it and to win trophies, but then Oxide comes and threatens the whole planet to become slaves unless their racing champion can beat him at racing, kicking off the plot of the Adventure mode.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Due to how power sliding works, acceleration tends to not be much of a factor for a good player, who will remain at top speed the whole race, and having a high turning stat may prove to be hindering, preventing a character from power sliding in a straight line (sound familiar?); so characters are tiered pretty much based on their top speed.
• Palmtree Panic: Crash Cove, the battle map Skull Rock, and the hub world N. Sanity Beach. Crash Cove is an idyllic island with palm trees, grassy hills and wooden bridges. A large shipwreck is present as well.
• Perfect Play A.I.: The AI will follow the same perfect loop each lap, that is exactly the same unless hit by a projectile from another player, meaning if you plop an obstacle on that path they'll drive right into it even if they as a human driver would have spotted it a mile away. It's not even uncommon for AI drivers to drop an obstacle on the track that nobody hits, do a loop of the track, and gleefully drive into their own obstacle. A tried and true tactic to cheese the second boss Papu Papu is to just drop obstacles in the middle of the track during straightaways, as he drives down the dead center of the track whenever he isn't taking a turn.
• Personal Raincloud: Hitting red N.Brio's beaker will create a black storm cloud over said player with constant rain, slowing them down as long it lasts.
• Pick-up Hierarchy:
  • Primary: Boss Keys (and Trophies by extension) are the only required items for Nitros Oxide's first race. Relics are necessary for Oxide's rematch and the real ending, so they also count as Extra to an extent.
  • Secondary: Gems (required for playable bosses) and CTR Tokens. The Crystals and CTR letters that award the latter also count.
  • Tertiary: Wumpa Fuits. Relic Races also have the time crates that are necessary for better times.
  • Extra: Gold and Platinum Relics. N. Tropy's Racing Ghosts races (unlock N. Tropy) and the subsequent Nitros Oxide's ghost races that unlock the bonus scrapbook.
• Player-Exclusive Mechanic: The CPU racers never get any of the Comeback Mechanic weapons, unlike the player. They also never use the (harder) shortcuts, even on the hardest difficulty.
• Plot Coupon: In its Adventure Mode, has the trophies, then the boss keys, CTR Tokens, the Relics, and the 5 gems. You'd need the trophies from the race tracks to race the boss, which grants you the boss key if successful, which lets the player access new worlds with more race tracks and new bosses. All 4 keys are needed to race the Final Boss, Nitros Oxide. But after you won, Oxide demands you to gather the relics and then race against him again if the people of the earth wants him to go away (he's an alien); so now you have to gather the Tokens and Relics from the same tracks you played before, which also unlocks the Gem Cups that give you the gems necessary to open the last secret track to get one extra relic.
• Poison Mushroom: There are green and red potions which serve the same purpose as the fake item boxes in Mario Kart, allowing players to create their own poison mushrooms by planting the potions behind or inside item crates which will respawn and completely hide the trap within. This can be done with TNT and Nitro crates too, but it requires near perfect angle and timing; otherwise, the trap is somewhat visible.
• Portal Endpoint Resemblance: Played with. While four of the five Hub Levels thematics are centered around one of their four tracks, subtle details around these tracks' portals refer to them. The most blatant example is Citadel City whose rooms are decorated to fit three tracks thematics while the fourth is placed at the exterior with a blimp above the portal, and the "boss garage" is right in front of it to show where it will happen.
• Promoted to Playable: Most of the game's playable roster is formed by the bosses of all 3 previous games in the series, where only Crash and (in the third game) Coco were playable.
• Railroad Tracks of Doom: There is a mine cart track in Komodo Joe's boss race. If you time it right and have a turbo, you can cut about 30 seconds off the course (more if you stay on the tracks past the first tunnel... and avoid the oncoming carts.)
• Purposely Overpowered: Attempted with Penta Penguin in the European/Australian version. However, due to poor handling actually being an advantage, he's not actually top tiered.
• Refuge in Audacity: In Cortex's epilogue, he names his newly-discoverd element "cortexrulestheworldium".
• Regional Bonus: Penta Penguin, the most secret character, is a run-of-the-mill beginner character in the American version, but, in the European/Australian version, has all stats maxed out.
• Rubber-Band A.I.:
  • Getting wiped out, no matter how long you have to wait, will not take you very far behind the pack, and striking out ahead will cause them to suddenly get very fast in the last lap. Similarly, the enemy racers change their behavior depending on the lap and your position in the pack. Characters in front of the player will shoot at each other much more often than any other character, giving the player the chance to "get lucky" and sneak to the front of the pack, and the AI becomes much more aggressive on the second lap and less aggressive on the third, making it so the player has to fight to get to first but then reducing the chances of having an AI racer skirt past seconds before the finish line.
  • The Boss races are extremely blatant; no matter how far you fall behind, they're still within range to make the race winnable. It's extremely difficult to get a lead on them for more than a moment, however...
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Tiger Temple happens on a ruin temple which seems to worship tigers. Its Hub Level, the Lost Ruins, Papu's Pyramid, and the battle level Rampage Ruins fit too.
• Rule of Cool: Pinstripe, the tommy-gun wielding mafioso, has his level be a gloriously impractical length of twisty tarmac in the sky. This is in contrast to the more 'normal' levels of the other warm-up bosses (a Shark Tunnel, Mayincatec temple and an underground cavern).
• Sacrificial Planet: Unused audio found in the game's files reveals that Oxide is the cause of the barren wasteland on Mars: the inhabitants on the planet failed to defeat him at racing and thus got obliterated. He threatens to do the same on Earth (by making the planet a parking lot and enslaving all its inhabitants) if they fail to defeat him at racing, too - setting up the story.
  You're the fastest racer so far? You're the best this planet can offer? This is going to be a bigger joke than that last civilization I challenged. What was it called... on that red planet so close to here... Oh, yes. I think you call it Mars. Now that was an easy win. What? You say there is no civilization on the planet Mars? (laughs) Not anymore! They lost the race!
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The tracks in Adventure Mode aren't placed in ascending difficulty. Many times, the courses are chosen because it fits into the theme of the world rather than difficulty. This is why, for example, the second world has both Coco Park and Papu's Pyramid, a simple track and a pretty hard track respectively. The Arcade Mode cups fix this and the tracks are in ascending difficulty.
• Secret A.I. Moves: When fought as bosses, Komodo Joe and Nitros Oxide demonstrate the ability to throw TNT crates into the air and have them explode upon hitting the ground. Outside of hopping to get a TNT crate off of a racer's head, this cannot be done in-game, as TNT crates can only be placed behind the player when used and cannot be made to explode at will.
• Secret Character: Penta Penguin is the only character who must be unlocked with a cheat code. The other hidden characters can be unlocked via cheat codes or accomplishing in-game tasks.
• Shark Tunnel: Most of Roo's Tubes takes place in a series of underwater tunnels.
• Single-Use Shield: The shield item gives temporary protection from a single attack/hazard, Having ten Wumpa fruit turns the shield from green to blue, meaning it lasts forever, so long as you don't take a hit or use it as a projectile.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Blizzard Bluff is a relatively innocent snow level, while the harder Polar Pass' is a more technical pack ice level with seals, ice pools and a big jump. The Hub Level Glacier Park and the battle map The North Bowl are a midpoint between it.
• SNK Boss: Nitros Oxide is deliberately designed to be as unfair of a boss as possible. It's one thing that he drops the items of every single boss character, but he also crosses the starting line before the green light, and datamining reveals that he's the only character in the game (besides Penta Penguin in the European release) who has perfect stats in every category.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: A faster remix of each level BGM will be played once you reach the last lap.
• Space Zone: The Oxide Station track is set inside a massive space station with a zero gravity segment in-between. It doubles as a Marathon Level due to its extreme length. It's also the only track that cannot be played in multiplayer.
• Spit Out a Shoe: The main platformers' Man-Eating Plants will spit out the karts' wheels after they eat one.
• Springtime for Hitler: A meta example. Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin knew that their contract with Universal was about to expire, so to make the Crash Bandicoot license seem unappealing to contractors, they made Nitros Oxide the main antagonist, hoping that the inclusion of an alien would make everybody think they were Jumping the Shark. Unfortunately for them, Nitros Oxide became a popular character, and CTR is remembered as one of the PlayStation's best.
• Squashed Flat: A number of the track-specific obstacles can flatten the racers and make them run slower for a time, such as the rolling barrels in Sewer Speedway or the rolling rocks in Blizzard Bluff. You can also inflict this on other players with the Turbo weapon by activating it and then pressing the hop button when you're crashing behind them (it needs good timing).
• Stock Footage: The Naughty Dog crate burst animation from the intro is exactly the same one from Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped.
• Tears of Defeat: Several characters (mainly villainous ones) cry on the podium if they don't win the race, such as Cortex and N. Tropy.
• Thanking the Viewer: At the end of the scrapbook showcase, there's a few images shown of the Naughty Dog staff that ends with the words ”Thanks for Playing!” alongside the signatures of them all.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: The rolling bomb weapons, sometimes called Bowling Bombs, which can only be shot in a straight line, forwards or backwards. You can also press Circle a second time to prematurely detonate it if you're slightly off-target, which becomes much more useful with a juiced-up Bomb as it gets a wider blast radius.
• Time Trial: Two Time Trial modes. Relic Race, accessed from Adventure mode, features the series' staple time-freezing crates and even subtracts 10 seconds from your final time if you smash every crate on the track. Time Trial, accessible from the main menu, is the typical Racing Game "go through the track as fast as you can" mode with no items or gimmicks.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Every item has a "juiced-up" version if you have the maximum 10 Wumpa Fruit (which are scattered around the course and also slightly increase your speed, like the coins in Mode-7 Mario Kart titles as well as 7 and 8).
  • One particularly noteworthy example is the Warp Orb. A normal Warp Orb acts like a Mario Kart Spiny Shell and targets the player in first place, although other racers in its path can get hit if they aren't careful. The juiced-up Warped Orb? It hits EVERYBODY IN FRONT OF THE PLAYER.
  • Penta Penguin in the European/Australian version has souped up stats everywhere, making him quite the speed demon.
• The Unfought:
  • N. Tropy in the main game; you only fight him in the Time Trial mode. Quite fittingly.
  • Same with Fake Crash and Penta, both of whom don't even show up as opponents in the game at all.
• The Unintelligible: Ripper Roo, who speaks in mad laughter outside of the Japanese version.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: There's a slight bug with the way carts are reset after they fall off of the track. The game has a set distance that is recovered to place the player's carts, regardless of what section of the track is (or isn't) there at the time. This can be especially bad on some tracks that require a long boosting sequence to clear. Fall short, and enjoy the endless loop of the game resetting your cart in the middle of empty space, or a standing start on a single acceleration panel launching you only halfway ad infinitum.
• Variable Mix: In the hub world, each and every hub has a variation of the overworld theme that plays in the background.
• Vehicular Combat: Battle Mode, where players try to shoot each other while speeding on their karts.
• Villain Respect: Upon showing up to challenge Oxide a second time with all the time relics collected, he’ll earnestly admit to being impressed before beginning the race.
• Wacky Racing: Crash Team Racing is essentially "Mario Kart meets the Looney Tunes", essentially because the weapons are more hardcore: bananas are replaced by toxic beakers, fake item boxes by TNT crates, and shells by bombs and missiles.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Papu Papu, to racers who aren't Tiny or Dingodile. Top speed is his primary stat, and Papu's Pyramid does not offer much of a disadvantage for him as most of the turns needed are still wide enough for him (and Tiny/Dingodile) to make without much of an issue. The map is significantly more difficult than other levels within the same mini-hub. The trade-off is that Papu Papu's traps are the N. Brio beakers, which he throws far behind him, making them easier to dodge than the TNT crates Ripper Roo places directly behind him. After Papu Papu is defeated, the game's Adventure Mode begins to shape up.
• Warm-Up Boss: Ripper Roo is a character with low top speed, a high handling that wouldn't do him any good in his challenge map (as said map, Roo's Tubes, is one of the simplest and most straightforward in the game), and while his trademark TNT traps are difficult to dodge, they can usually be easily shaken off (unless you're heading over a ramp, in which case you generally won't be able to get enough hops in to shake it off due to the decline making each hop longer).
• Weaponized Car: The characters can break crates to unlock homing missiles, rolling bombs, TNT/Nitro crates, Deflector Shields, and other goodness. Also, in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, Dr. N. Gin attempted to patent such a system, but, as shown in the page quote, it was hastily withdrawn.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Played for Laughs, of course, like how Pinstripe becomes a used car salesman in New Jersey and Cortex finds a new element he calls (and patents as) "Cortexrulestheworldium".