Unsynced: The Last of Us Melee System
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as evidence that Lisp/Scheme-derived tooling is still used in professional game development at Naughty Dog.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2018 to 2026.
What it is
Anthony Newman of Naughty Dog presents a 2014 GDC talk on the design and implementation of the melee combat system in The Last of Us. It covers how the system was built, including the animation and gameplay engineering behind it.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
What people said
Cites sillysaurus3 · 2018-07 · Hacker News · on “The security model of WebAssembly”
I like the idea of "dynamically reconfiguring the syscalls", but I'm not sure what I would use it for. Exactly this. Little things, like why can't you just write `fs.readFileSync(<server URL>)`? That's all you want to do. You don't want to deal with issuing a fetch call and setting up handlers and so on. That should be abstracted from you. Ad everyone has their own ways of doing this, and you just search for whatever JS lib happens to tickle you that day. It's the opposite of a unified engine model. Why does that matter? Because the easier your code is to write, the faster you can write. And the larger the systems you can create, individually. Since system value scales inversely proportional
Cites shawn · 2018-09 · Hacker News · on “A micro manual for Lisp – Not the whole truth (1978) [pdf]”
Lots of Lisp interest today! Here are a few resources. On Lisp: [LINK] Lumen - a Lisp for JavaScript and Lua: [LINK] The Art of the Interpeter: [LINK] (^ this last one is very practical. If you reach the point of wanting to implement a practical interpreter, this paper will force you to consider many unexpected cases.) Simulating circuits with Lisp: [LINK] My favorite part of SICP: [LINK] War stories: [LINK] Lisp in Jak 'n Dexter / Crash Bandicoot: [LINK] Fun fact: Lisp is still used today in gamedev! Last of Us uses it heavily: [this video]
Cites so-cal-schemer · 2026-08 · Hacker News · on “A Friendly Introduction to Racket”
Naughty Dog was a great example of how productive Scheme can be in the hands of a few expert programmers. Founders attended MIT and CMU. GOAL and GOOL were used in Jak and Dexter, Crash Bandicoot, and apparently brought back in The Last of Us: [LINK] Unsynced: The Last of Us Melee System [this video] In this 2014 GDC session, Naughty Dog's Anthony Newman shares an overview of the design and implementation of the melee system for The Last of Us.