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Spyro the Dragon | Making of Documentary

74K views · Jul 27, 2025 · Gaming

Reliable Rhubarb

16K subscribers

Comments · 151

@ReliableRhubarb · 1 year ago (edited) · pinned
Check out some of my other documentaries: 01. The History of Gex: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfgR35rGNhY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfgR35rGNhY</a> 02. The History of Crash Bandicoot: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Bp7R4EVUw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Bp7R4EVUw</a> 03. The History of Croc: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn-npV8X6zw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn-npV8X6zw</a>
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@CryptoSeb · 1 year ago (edited)
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYigvECa3_4&t=6954">1:55:54</a> - Money Bags casualy saying "piss off" proper caught me off guard 😂😂😂
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@themeangene · 1 year ago (edited)
I know this took an incredible amount of work putting together. Rest easy. As a kid I didn't understand vertex coloring, LODs, index colors or any of those things. I just remember playing Spyro & Mario 64 and finally feeling like the promises of 3D were finally coming true.
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@spencerderosier6649 · 1 year ago
Blew gaming historian out of the water with this one.
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@themeangene · 1 year ago (edited)
I love that you cover the development in depth from a technical level. There's just something so quaint about 90s programmers building games like this using C and barebone modeling software. It's incredible how much depth exist in games like Spyro when they were stuck within 1 MB of VRAM. In fact I'm constantly impressed with what game devs accomplished in the 70s-90s. Spyro is only possible because of the brilliant optimization techniques developed very quickly in the 90s for texture mapped polygonal worlds. Nowadays game development is much more abstract. Most games are now built using middleware. You can throw gigabytes of memory at a problem. Each frame is now multiple render passes packaged together. 4k textures. Thousands of shader operations. It's just a different world.
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@dudefromtheearth · 1 year ago
Being in the age demographic of Spyro the Dragon back when it first debuted I can say that Sir you did major fan service for everyone who grew up playing these games. 🙏 It's also important for those younger than us to learn about the origins of a classic. What I found very interesting to learn about was all the cut content from the first game. I've watched some videos about Spyro the Dragon and this documentary has to be the best one that I've seen that I feel covers the whole nine yards when it comes to the trilogy made by Insomniac that totally deserves their flowers! Talk about one passionate game company that in the beginning especially felt so organic in its creation of Spyro.
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@gospyro · 1 month ago
I'm Craig Stitt and I approve of this video!!   I'm a little late to the party, but I really enjoyed this video.  Clearly a lot of research and digging through the internet took place inorder to find some of the fun little facts and factoids talked about here. Spyro is near and dear to my heart!  More so than any other game I've worked on.   One of the main reasons being, that if I had not been around for Sonic, or Ratchet and Clank, or any of the other games I worked on, someone else would have been there and done the art.  Maybe their art wouldn't have been as good, maybe it would have been better, but someone would have done it.   If I hadn't been at Insomniac and if I hadn't pitched the idea of the player being the dragon, then there would be no little purple dragon.  As is pointed out in the video, if I hadn't pitched my came, then Insominac's next game would have been an alien invasion or off road racing game. On a side note, when the video started talking about the team breaking off to come up with what to do next, I thought they might know what Brian Hasting's idea was (which I have long since forgotten).  Unfortunately it wasn't mentioned, which is about the time I started thinking that a lot of the info here was from possibly from previous interviews and comments I had made. When I first started watching, and they talk about the incredible work that Charles Zembillas did, I thought to myself, "well... there's more to that story"... only to have the "more" told and expanded upon!   The only thing that I would like to expand upon, or correct, is the quote by Ted Price that the "entire team" was ready and wanted to move away from Spyro.  While there were a number of people who wanted to move on, there were also a good number of people who did NOT want to move on, and still saw more potential and fun to be had making more Spyro games. Yes, we NEEDED to get away from Universal and work directly with SONY, which meant leaving Spyro behind, but there were plenty of people who did not like it. Great video!!
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@josephwest3287 · 1 year ago
I totally didn’t get teary eyed multiple times watching this or anything. No way.
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@yargum69 · 1 year ago
I love the fact that the music for this game was composed by Stewart Copeland, the drummer for The Police!
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@theconductor20 · 2 months ago
Dude I'm down for a 2 hour Spyro video
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@Megumi_Bandicoot · 1 year ago
And when the world needed him most, he came back.
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@richardli4038 · 9 months ago
every studio remaking / remastering games should be required to learn the full history of the original game development. so they can truly understand what feelings to capture in the remake
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