Given the task of forming the personalities of the "Crash Nitro Kart" cast through the full-motion videos, the Red Eye Studio artists set certain rules for how each character would carry itself by default. As animator Thomas Happ noted, "N. Gin, for example, would always default to twitchy, side-to-side glances, while Tiny would often scratch his head in confusion. There were a lot of scenes where the characters are just standing around listening to Emperor Velo talk, and we had to invent ways to personalize their mannerisms and create a uniquely 'thinking character'." To achieve the bold and deeply saturated colors and textures for the characters and environments, the artists used Maya as well as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. While the artists adapted many of the sets and props in the cinematics from in-game counterparts, they recreated the majority of these objects from scratch in order to add surrealism to the scenery. The cinematics were completed well in advance of the four-month deadline. The console version of "Crash Nitro Kart" was announced by Vivendi Universal prior to the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2003, while the N-Gage version was announced on February 16, 2004. "Crash Nitro Kart" is among the first titles to be developed using the Intrinsic Alchemy middleware technology following Vicarious Visions' purchase of its rights from the defunct Intrinsic Graphics.