The removed level "Stormy Ascent" was, according to Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, made as an homage to the Castle Wall level in Wizards & Warriors.

Back when the game was still known as "Willie the Wombat", Mark Cerny had commissioned Hanna-Barbera to help give out some ideas and suggestions on what Willie would look like. The aforementioned task was given to an employee of the studio at the time named Butch Hartman, who went on to create a slew of animated series for the children's television network Nickelodeon.

According to director Jason Rubin, Crash Bandicoot utilized a system of dynamic difficulty, making various tweaks based on how well or how poorly the player was doing. Many of these tweaks were made to facilitate more inexperienced players, such as providing more lives and Wumpa Fruit to players running low on lives, giving Aku-Aku Masks after losing 5 lives, and slowing down boulders with each lost life.

In the levels "Cortex Power" and "Toxic Waste", there are two enemies that appear to be genetically-altered gangster potoroos, similar to the boss character, Pinstripe Potoroo. This is unusual as no other genetically-altered animals appear as common enemies in the game.
This also implies that Dr. Cortex created a larger gang of potoroo enforcers, but because Pinstripe has rarely appeared in later installments, this has never been elaborated.

According to developer Andy Gavin, Naughty Dog wanted Crash to animate similarly to the old Looney Tunes cartoons with squash-and-stretch physics. This was achieved with "vertex animation" which allowed 3-4 points of articulation as opposed the more common and stiffer "skeletal animation" which only used single points.

Crash Bandicoot was originally going to have traditionally-animated cutscenes, but these cutscenes were never implemented into the game. The reason for the cutscenes being dropped was that Sony wanted to emphasize the 3D graphics in the game.

During the level "Generator Room", there are multiple monitors that show Dr. Cortex's face. Upon closer inspection, however, the capital "N" on Cortex's forehead is missing.

When coming up with the idea of how the game should play, the developers decided to turn the screen so you would play running in and out rather than left and right. They jokingly call this the "Sonic's Ass" game since you are always looking at Crash's back.

13 years after the release of the game, it was discovered that there is an unused, fully complete level in the code of the game. The level is named 'Stormy Ascent', and was removed because of its difficulty.

Ripper Roo's laugh is the same laugh as the Hyena from Lady and the Tramp, just shortened.