Wumpa Fruit

Wumpa Fruit are Crash's favorite food and a common object of all Crash Bandicoot games. Collecting 100 wumpa fruit will give Crash an extra life (platformers from Crash Bandicoot to Crash Twinsanity). In Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage, Crash instead has infinite lives and certain amounts of wumpa fruit are needed to access some levels and buy trading cards. Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart use wumpa fruit to "juice-up" the weapons that players pick up throughout a race or during a battle. In Crash Bash, wumpa fruit serves as either health or speed boosts, like in the Crash Dash minigames.

In Crash of the Titans, they are used to replenish health. There is also golden wumpa fruit that give the player lives. They are obtained when the player sacrifices a titan to a large mojo sphere or when a spybot is destroyed. In Mind Over Mutant golden wumpa fruit extend Crash's health bar when collected. There are 14 golden wumpa fruit in this game, and each can only be collected once. During Doctor N. Gin's boss fight in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Crash launches wumpa fruit at N. Gin's mech to damage it. If Crash spins wumpa fruit, they will fly away, but if Crash slides into wumpa fruit, he will collect it normally.

Entry in Crash 2's instruction booklet
The following info is taken from the Crash 2 instruction booklet.

"Collect 100 pieces of Wumpa Fruit and earn a free life (1-up)."

Appearances

 * Crash Bandicoot
 * Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
 * Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
 * Crash Team Racing
 * Crash Bash
 * Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex
 * Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure
 * Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced
 * Crash Nitro Kart
 * Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage
 * Crash Twinsanity
 * Crash Tag Team Racing
 * Crash Boom Bang!
 * Crash of the Titans
 * Crash: Mind Over Mutant
 * Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken (as apples)

Trivia

 * In Crash Bandicoot, if players happen to leave Crash standing for too long, Crash will hit himself with a wumpa fruit, revealing purple juice. However, this has been retconned from Crash Tag Team Racing onward, with the juice being yellow instead.
 * In Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, if players leave Crash standing for a while, he'll start juggling a wumpa fruit or pull one out of his ear.
 * In Crash of The Titans, wumpa fruit is instead used to restore health.
 * They have a strong resemblance to peaches, and their colors have a strong resemblance to apples.
 * In Japan, wumpa fruits are called "apples".
 * Also in Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken, Crash is shown to love apples (wumpa fruit), this is shown multiple times, such as accepting a bribe from the Cortex, even though he forgot what he was doing, or getting overly excited for finding a huge apple.
 * Wumpa fruits were supposed to be appear in Crash Tag Team Racing as collectibles.
 * The first grand prix of Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart is called the Wumpa Cup.
 * Wumpa fruit are just like coins from the Mario series and rings from the Sonic series, as they can be collected and getting 100 gives an extra life.
 * The first part of the name, "wumpa", might be a pun on the word "wampum", which is a word meaning money.