Spyro 1 history -    • Spyro the Dragon - A History  
Spyro 2 history -    • Spyro: Ripto's Rage!/Gateway to Glimm...  



It’s time for another look into the history of Spyro the Dragon, and today’s video will of course be about the final game to appear on the Playstation 1 and my personal favourite of the whole series – Year of the Dragon.

Development on Year of the Dragon began shortly after the release of Spyro 2, going on for nearly 11 months, before the game was finished in September 2000 and released late October of the same year.

While coming up with new ideas for their third instalment in the Spyro franchise, the team took a lot of inspiration from other games. You’ll see elements of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Goldeneye, Crash Bandicoot, as well as the odd film reference here or there! Perhaps the biggest change from previous entries though is the addition of the extra playable characters Sheila, Sgt. Byrd, Bentley, Agent 9 and even Sparx himself.

Another change in this title was the implementation of crack protection, and it was so good that it took hackers over two months to develop a working patch. This was the last Spyro game to be developed by Insomniac Games. As much as the team loved working on the series, they felt they couldn’t bring anything new to the table and decided it was better to leave it on a high note, after 5 stressful but awesome years.

IGN gave Spyro 3 high praise, stating –
“If you liked the past Spyros, this one will almost certainly be your favorite of the lot. It has all their speed and graphical polish, the same remarkably well-done control, lots more variety in its gameplay, and most of all, the dangerously cute Spyro personality… even if Spyro has to share a little bit of the spotlight, [Year of the Dragon] is as fine a note as any for them to go out on, and proves that the PlayStation, even if it's losing all its thunder to PS2, can still play host to a universally excellent game.”

To this day, Spyro: Year of the Dragon is rated the 2nd most popular game in the whole series, with a score of 90.59% on GameRankings.com.