Crash Team Racing Renames Racially Offensive Skins
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled has made several name changes to a few recently-released racer skins in the game, specifically with regards to those that feature names that could be considered racially insensitive. Developer Beenox issued a patch earlier this week that tweaked the names of several new DLC skins added to the game in an update on July 6th, but never explained why it was doing so.
Of course, gamers can read between the lines when many of the renamed skins feature either “Black” or White” in their name. For example, the White Tawna skin has been renamed to White Tiger Tawna, presumably to differentiate from a race-based descriptor to one that has an animal connotation. From a design perspective, White Tiger Tawna sounds better, but White Tawna when she’s not actually a human does sound odd.
But the biggest offender in the new Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled skins seems to be the Watermelon Tawna skin, which has since been renamed to Summertime Tawna. While the standard Tawna skin depicts Crash Bandicoot’s girlfriend with blonde hair and light fur, the Watermelon Tawna skin darkens her fur and gives her a t-shirt with a watermelon theme.
It’s highly likely that Beenox meant no disrespect with the design of the Watermelon Tawna skin in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, but it’s easy to see why some gamers may be offended. The same could be said for skins like Black N. Cortex, which just as easily could have been labeled in a number of different ways.
Outside of a small hiccup in the naming of some skins, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled seems to be well received by fans of the Crash franchise. After finding success with the N. Sane Trilogy remaster, Activision was quick to build off that hype with the announcement that Crash Team Racing would be getting the current-gen makeover.
However, developer Beenox took things a step further by delivering a kart racing game that is extremely challenging regardless of the difficulty. In a lot of ways, the developer seems to have taken the idea that Crash Bandicoot games are supposed to be hard (some might say cheap) and ran with it.
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is available now for PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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