The "Play as Nitros Oxide" legend is an urban legend revolving around the 1999 racing game Crash Team Racing.
Description
Soon after the release of this Crash Bandicoot kart-racing spin-off, photographs began to surface online that appeared to show the game’s main antagonist, alien overlord Nitrous Oxide, as a playable racer, a feat that can’t normally be accomplished in the game. The most common method for unlock Nitrous Oxide involved the following long series of steps: collecting all of the game’s Platinum Relics, defeating Nitrous Oxide in the race against him, defeating all of the N. Tropy ghosts in a specific order, defeating all of the Nitrous Oxide ghosts in a specific order, and finally entering the code “Right, Circle, Triangle, Left, Down, Circle, Triangle, Left” while holding both the L1 and R1 buttons on the game’s main menu.
Completing this sequence of steps sadly fails to unlock Nitrous Oxide. However, codes soon began to surface online for cheat devices such as the GameShark. One of these codes did, in fact, allow players to play as Nitrous Oxide. However, he only works on certain courses and causes the game to crash after a short time. Developers later revealed that his being playable is merely a glitch and was not intentional at all.
In late Fall of 2018, it was announced that a remake of the game, to be titled Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, was being developed by Beenox. It has been confirmed that Nitros Oxide will officially be unlockable in the game and purchasing a special premium edition allows players to have access to him from the start.