You may recall rumours and reports from several months ago that indicated that there was a new Crash Bandicoot game in development, one called Crash Wumpa League. Then flash forward to last week and a Crash game was announced, but not the rumoured Crash Wumpa League, a game called Crash Team Rumble. Many had presumed that Team Rumble had just been rebranded as can sometimes be the way of marketing teams, however, we’re now beginning to learn that this may not have actually been the case, as it’s possible that both Crash Team Rumble, and Crash Wumpa League are in fact very, very different entirely.

The word comes from the mysterious Natalie, a supposed QA tester who worked on Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, who has outlined the fact that Crash Wumpa League was at one point an intended expansion for the latest mainline entry, while the newly revealed Crash Team Rumble, represents what she was aware of in no way, shape, or form. Did You Know Gaming’s Liam Robertson also backed up the sentiments expressed by Natalie, but also dredged up the now-deleted post from the QA tester to lay out, in the eyes of all, what she was aware of. Natalie’s post reads,

My name is [redacted], I was a QA tester at Activision-Blizzard from Spring 2020, to Spring 2021. I worked on several Call Of Duty games, the CTR: Nitro-Fueled patch that was released for next-gen compatibility, and primarily Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. You can find my name in the credits; they put us way at the bottom lmao. I knew about Crash Team Rumble.

Now that it’s public knowledge, I can tell you a little bit about it. First off, I’m sorry y’all, but it’s not Wumpa League. To the best of my knowledge, Wumpa League didn’t exist. There was never a working project title called “Wumpa League” and now that we have a traler, there’s not a releasing game called Wumpa League either.

So what is Crash Team Rumble? Crash Team Rumble is the finished version of a scrapped “versus” multiplayer mode for Crash 4. It wasn’t originally a separate project. Working on Crash 4, all of us knew it existed. But I and several of the other QA testers never got to playtest it because it was cancelled before we joined the project.

Crash 4 was on a tight release schedule, and some content was cut. But you can still find references to this mode in the game. The completionist ending features a tournament and the newly revealed Bat character. And there’s the easter egg of the Wumpa fruit symbol on the TV. It’s also why the reveal trailer only features characters from Crash 4.

Was this game in development for this entire time you’ve been theorizing and aking Wumpa League rumors? To the best of my knowledge, no. After Crash 4 released in October 2020, it was viewed as a financial failure because it pulled in less sales than Nitro-fueled. We worked on the CTR patch and the Crash 4 ports for Switch and PC until they released in the Spring, then the entire QA was either laid off (along with hundreds of other Activision employees) or moved to work on Call Of Duty Vanguard. Nobody was working on what you guys would call yearly “family games”

Later it was revealed in the news that some Toys For Bob’s development team had also started supporting Call Of Duty. As far as any of us knew, Crash Team Rumble wasn’t getting released because it had already been cancelled long ago and everybody was working on Call Of Duty. It seems they picked this one back up and finished it, so I hope it turns out well.

Crash Team Rumble was just announced at The Game Awards as is planned for release in 2023 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S