Bandicoots Don't Exist?

Allow me to tell you a story from my childhood...

Now I'm a big fan of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy on the PS1. I even enjoyed the spin off titles: Crash Team Racing and Crash Bash. However, I do feel after the series migrated to the PS2 and Naughty Dog handed over development to Traveller’s Tales, the series began to go downhill. Crash 4: The Wrath of Cortex was OK, but the rest of them? Ugh.

Anyway, I was 5 years old when the original was released in 1996 and 7 years old when Crash Bandicoot 2 was released. I was in year 2 of primary school, and quite frankly obsessed with all sorts of video games, not just Crash. My teacher hated this; as nearly every creative project we were given, everything I did had an air of video games about it - I started writing fan fiction from a very young age, as soon as I got my own computer, I was unstoppable!

Anyway, one day at school, we had to write a story about what we would do if we were an animal for a day. Naturally, I chose a bandicoot. I was quickly shot down however, when the teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class, berating me for what felt like hours about “how bandicoots didn't exist.”

I ended up writing about a bear instead, but I was upset for the rest of the day. When I got home that night, I told my mam what happened. She was furious - and took me upstairs to her room where she dug out an encyclopedia of animals. After flipping through a few pages, she found a double - page spread on bandicoots. 

Bandicoots are small creatures that live on a mixture of insects, spiders and fungus. They’re native to Australia and Papua New Guinea - indeed, they are real. but of course, I already knew this. After playing Crash Bandicoot initially, I asked my parents if they were a real animal, and they assured me they were. My parents were always big into zoos, safari parks and animal conservation, and still are to this day - and like any parent, refuse to stand by when they know their child has been wrongfully punished.

The encyclopedia was essentially a big ringbinder folder, thus the pages could be removed. Mam sent me to school the next day, armed with the evidence that bandicoots DID actually exist. I got an apology from the teacher - and elevated my status amongst the other mini video game nerds in my class.