The crates in the game were made to fill in the more boring parts of the levels.
During development, Crash Bandicoot was codenamed "The Sonic's Ass Game", since the camera always points to the characters back side.
The character of Tawna was initially removed from the series due to some complaints from the marketing director at Universal Interactive Studios. In her point of view, the initial character design for Tawna was too outrageous, so Tawna was re-designed before being built into the game. Naughty Dog thought the ending result was too different from what they had in mind, so she was ultimately removed in the sequels.
This game was made in memory of Tae Min Kim, who was part of Naughty Dog when they developed Way of the Warrior (1994) for the 3DO console.
There was a difficult variant of the level "Slippery Climb" that was called "Stormy Ascent". It was taken out due to being too difficult. However, it can still be played in a mostly complete version with a Gameshark, as the Bonus Level wasn't coded in, getting the bonus tokens will crash the game. The game was later implemented in "Crash Bandicoot N. Same Trilogy" as a downloadable DLC.