Best Spyro the Dragon Games of All Time

Spyro the Dragon: The PS1 3D Platformer Alternative

Insomniac Games’ Spyro the Dragon (1998) arrived two years after Crash Bandicoot and took a fundamentally different approach to the same platform. Where Crash used corridors and fixed cameras to constrain the 3D environment into manageable design, Spyro used open world-spaces with dynamic camera control and free movement. Spyro could fly freely within the limits of each level’s airspace, explore home worlds connecting multiple stages, and traverse environments built for genuine discovery rather than linear completion.

The three Insomniac-developed Spyro games — 1998, 1999, 2000 — represent a coherent trilogy that escalated the original’s open exploration design with more varied mechanics and larger worlds. The series demonstrated that the PS1 could handle genuinely open 3D spaces at small scales, prefiguring the open-world design principles that the PS2 generation would expand.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon — The Series Peak

Spyro: Year of the Dragon (2000) is simultaneously the most content-dense and most mechanically varied game in the original trilogy. The egg-collecting premise expanded the game’s scope across four home worlds and numerous sub-worlds; the playable character variety — Sheila the Kangaroo, Sgt. Byrd the Penguin, Bentley the Yeti, Agent 9 the Monkey — gave specific missions within each world to non-Spyro characters with entirely different move sets.

The game includes a haunted mansion level, a cowboy western world, a kung fu movie stage, an aquatic level with swimming mechanics, and a skateboarding challenge level — variety that no prior Spyro game approached. Year of the Dragon’s content per disc represents the maximum the PS1 format allowed for this type of exploration platformer.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage — The Structural Improvement

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage (1999) added the orb collectible structure replacing the original’s gem collection, introduced NPC characters in each world with mini-quest chains, and created a home world hub (Avalar) more elaborate than the original’s Dragon Realms. The additional NPC interaction gave the levels more purpose than the original’s pure exploration framework.

The game introduced Spyro’s charge attack, the hover ability extending glide range, and the supercharge ramps that sent Spyro racing across levels at extremely high speed — mechanics that Year of the Dragon expanded on. Ripto’s Rage’s structural improvements over the original are significant enough that some players consider it the better game despite Year of the Dragon’s greater content scope.

The Original’s Enduring Legacy

The original Spyro the Dragon (1998) benefited from Stewart Copeland’s (The Police drummer) soundtrack — one of gaming’s more unexpected composer credits — and a dragon world aesthetic that stood apart from the platform game conventions of the era. The 2018 Spyro Reignited Trilogy remake proved the original three games’ design substantial enough to support full reconstruction with modern technology, with the remakes selling over 10 million copies.