The Crash Bandicoot games may only have been best sellers in Japan, but in the United States these were the games that defined the Sony PlayStation.
Though Sony always denied it, Crash became the PlayStation's mascot. When magazines and newspapers created art depicting the struggle between Nintendo, Sega, and Sony (Sega made hardware during this period and Microsoft had not thrown its silk-lined top hat into the ring), they drew cartoons with Mario, Sonic and Crash fighting in a ring.
But Sony saw something that the rest of us ignored. While Sony owned a stake in Naughty Dog, the development house that invented Crash, Universal Interactive published the Crash Bandicoot games.