Spyro the Dragon

Spyro the Dragon is a dragon character hailing from the Dragon Realms and is the titular main protagonist of his own series and franchise. He has also appeared in a few Crash Bandicoot games, he also has a dark counterpart in Crash Bandicoot: On the Run!.

Relationship with the Crash Bandicoot series
The Spyro the Dragon series is considered the sister series to Crash Bandicoot and this relationship goes back many years. When the games first started being created, their developers (Naughty Dog and Insomniac) worked in close proximity to each other and employees often went to parties together and became close friends. This had an impact on each other's games.

Crash Bandicoot: Warped/Crash Team Racing/Crash Bash
A demo for the first game in the Spyro series can be played in Crash Bandicoot: Warped by inputting a special code (similarly, a demo for Warped is accessible in the first Spyro game via the same method): up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, square(this code is noticeably similar to the Konami Code). A demo for the second game in the Spyro series can be accessed in Crash Team Racing using the same method. Also, in Crash Bash, a demo of Spyro: Year of the Dragon is playable by holding L1 and R1 and pressing square then Start at the Universal Interactive Studios screen

Crash Nitro Kart (GBA)
Spyro appears as an unlockable character in the Game Boy Advance versions of Crash Nitro Kart. He is unlocked after beating Velo as Team Bandicoot. In contrast to his traditional depiction as a hero, Spyro in this game races for Team Trance, and uses Uka Uka as his mask, implying that he was brainwashed by N. Trance. His driving status is listed below:

Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage and Spyro Orange: Cortex Conspiracy
Spyro appears in Ripto's Rampage and Cortex Conspiracy, the crossover between Crash and Spyro series. Crash and Spyro start a fight when they first meet each other, due to Ripto's minions having been altered to resemble Spyro and Crash in their respective worlds. However, they realized they had been tricked by their archenemies after this fight, and teamed up to put an end to Cortex and Ripto's plan.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
Spyro appears as a playable character in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled as part of the Spyro N. Friends Grand Prix, using his Reignited Trilogy design, and avaliable as a reward for completing the Bronze Tier. He is later purchasable in the Pit Stop for 1500 Wumpa Coins as of the Winter Festival Grand Prix update. His driving status is listed below:

Crash Team Rumble
Spyro initially had only a small cameo in Rumble, with his balloon float from It's About Time appearing in the background of the Jazz Junction map. An inflatable pool toy resembling him can also be seen in the Life's A Beach banner.

With the launch of Season 3, Spyro was added as a playable character. He is in the Scorer role, which makes a Spyro player's main goal collecting Wumpa Fruit and depositing them in their team's bank.

Other cameos/appearances
Spyro makes a small cameo in a Twinsanity cutscene, where he is seen defending his gems from N. Tropy, N. Brio and N. Gin, previously stolen by the Evil Twins. His model and fire effects are from Spyro: A Hero's Tail, which released a couple months after Twinsanity. A trailer for Hero's Tail is also the 100% completion reward in the NTSC-U versions of the game.

Spyro has some cameo appearances within It's About Time. The first is as an inflatable pool toy at the beginning of the level Rude Awakening, which floats away into the sea if spun. The second cameo is in the level Off Beat, where he appears as a balloon float in the parade.

In Tawna's 100% ending illustration, a stack of games can be seen sitting beside her. Among this stack is a copy of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy.

Spyro shows up in Season 3: Battle of the Dragons from On the Run! alongside his evil doppelganger, Dark Spyro, who is the main villain and temporary boss for Crash or Coco to defeat. Dark Spyro has teamed up with Gnasty Gnorc and used a portal left behind by the female Nefarious Tropy in the previous season to enter Crash's dimension, attempting to take over. Spyro discovered their plan and followed them through the portal, only for the portal to break behind him. Spyro teams up with Crash and Coco, asking for their help to defeat the villains and gather parts and ingredients so he can repair the portal and go home. A Spyro themed skin for Crash was also added, as well as Dark Spyro skins for both Crash and Coco.

During Dark Spyro's boss fight, he attacks by calling bolts of purple lightning to strike the ground, by breathing purple fire down a lane, or by flapping his wings to blow TNT crates towards the player. Like all bosses, he is defeated by chasing him and throwing Boom Berries at him to reduce his health bar to zero, then using the Portal Weapons crafted beforehand to send him back to his own dimension.

At the season's end, Spyro successfully repairs the portal and sends Dark Spyro back to the Dragon Realms. He thanks Crash and Coco for their help, but warns them that Gnasty Gnorc escaped and is still on the loose before entering the portal himself to go home.

Non Crash games
Spyro acts as one of the NPCs in the Skylanders: Imaginators adventure pack level based on the Crash Bandicoot franchise, Thumpin' Wumpa Islands. He can also appear as a playable character if the player owns one of his Skylander figures.

Other media
Spyro is the main protagonist of the Skylanders Academy series, in which Crash makes a guest appearance at the end of the Season 1 episode ''[https://skylanders.fandom.com/wiki/The_Skylands_Are_Falling! The Skylands Are Falling!]. The subsequent episode Crash Landing'' is centered around Spyro and his friends searching for a dark relic to send Crash back home. While this version of Crash is part of a separate continuity from the games, his dialogue suggests that the episode happens shortly after the events of Crash Bandicoot.

The Season 3 episode Days of Future Crash has Dark Spyro and Eruptor travel back in time to the events of Crash Landing to meet with Crash again, with Spyro intending to use him to open the Wumpan Puzzle Box containing the Map to Arkus. Crash and Coco also appear during the final battle in the series finale, Raiders of the Lost Arkus, Part 2.

Personality
Spyro is a cocky, heroic young dragon. He can be arrogant at times, but cares deeply about his friends, charging (sometimes literally) into the face of danger to fight those who threaten him, his friends or his home. He's very headstrong and fiery, being impatient and irresponsible at times. He can also be mischievous and a little bratty.

Physical Appearance
Spyro is a small, purple child dragon. He has a yellow mohawk and horns on his head, yellow wings with orange webbing, a yellow spike on the tip of his tail, a yellow plated belly. He has purple eyes with heavy eyebrow ridges and grey claws.

Creation and early development
Spyro, as a concept, was originally brought up by Insomniac in-house artist Craig Stitt, who had an interest in the fictional beasts. With the dragon decided upon, the developers then began conceptualizing names and potential designs for the character.

In very early development, Spyro was depicted as green, but developers noted that he would blend into the grass in the levels too much. Additionally, as there were several other green reptile characters such as Gex and Croc already on the same console at the time, another color was decided upon to help Spyro differentiate from these characters. In early 1997, Spyro's purple color was chosen, due to it contrasting well with greens and other colors commonly found in various environments.

Prior to deciding on a name for the character, Spyro was referred to as "Pete", a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1977 Disney film, Pete's Dragon. Allegedly, this was nothing more than a codename for the character, picked in this manner to remind them to not "get sued" by Disney. The name carried over to much of the game's development time, and was even reported on by retail outlets as late as March 1998. According to some developers, a second name - "Pyro" - was briefly used, being the Latin and Greek word for "fire." The name was altered to Spyro shortly afterwards, which would be the name that ultimately ended up sticking.

Character design
Insomniac brought on illustrator Charles Zembillas and tasked him with creating their dragon with the mentioned caveats in place.

Various drawings were the first pass in an attempt to find the character that would eventually become Spyro. The creative direction was simple and basic: Draw a dragon that a video game can be developed around. It didn't matter what the dragon looked like at this point. Decisions would come later based upon the sketches that were generated as Charles embarked upon the creative journey. An important factor in the concept design process was that the character would eventually be modeled digitally and animated in a 3-D (Three dimensional) program, so technical considerations and the final medium were something that had to be kept in mind while the conceptual sketches were in progress.

The initial designs were rather large and bipedal and featured a rather crude, beaked dragon. After the first creative pass into the project, the producers came to an important decision: they decided that the dragon would be a character that appealed to 8-10-year-olds. The character had to be cute, but at the same time, mischievous, bratty, unpredictable, and something of an upstart. By the end of this pass, the character design that would become the basis for Spyro, that of a smaller, cuter, quadrupedal, a tiny pointed-nose dragon, was defined.

Trivia

 * Both Crash and Spyro were designed by Charles Zembillas.
 * Spyro was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui in Spyro the Dragon (1998), who voiced Crash in the motion-capture advertisements for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. Spyro was voiced by Jess Harnell in Spyro: A Hero's Tail (2004), who also voiced Crash from Crash Tag Team Racing (2005) to Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled (2020). Spyro's current voice actor, Tom Kenny, is best known for voicing SpongeBob SquarePants; Kenny also voices N. Brio in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled.
 * Crash himself has made various cameos in Spyro games, including The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning and The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night, as well as being referenced in Spyro: Year of the Dragon. A trailer for Twinsanity is also included as an unlockable in A Hero's Tail.

Names in Other Languages

 * Dark Spyro

Gallery
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