How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica

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Strong rec lathiat · 2020-04 · on “Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]”

I'm loving this series from ARS, another great one about Crash Bandicoot where apparently they needed extra RAM so selectively overwrote the sony libraries in RAM with their own data, by experimenting which areas were needed on whether it crashed or not. [this video]

Strong rec jonas21 · 2020-04 · on “Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]”

This is part of a great series of interviews with the developers of some of the most influential games in history. Two of my favorites are Andy Gavin on Crash Bandicoot: [this video] and Sid Meier on Civilization: [LINK]

Strong rec dzeix35wc363CzC · 2020-04 · on “Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis”

For anyone interested how it was developing for the original PSX (and therefore under hardware constraints) How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation [this video] Immensely interesting video! "Old" hardware makes me feel so humble regarding what we have now. Hardware limitations back then really pushed developers towards novel approaches and solutions.

Strong rec mmm_grayons · 2020-09 · on “Amnesia is now open source”

For anyone that hasn't yet seen it, I'd highly recommend watching Ars Technica's video interview on Amnesia and how it created its unique atmosphere: [LINK] Along with the rest of their War Stories videos, for that matter. The interview with Andy Gavin on Crash Bandicoot is great, even though I never played the game: [this video]

Strong rec bmitc · 2022-01 · on “OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog”

In the cause of Naughty Dog, it was Andy Gavin who introduced Lisp and GOAL and was one of the co-founders of Naughty Dog. He came from MIT and was a student of Rodney Brooks. [LINK] [LINK] If someone hasn't seen it, his episode on Ars Technica's War Stories was awesome. He seems to be a hacker's hacker. It's a fascinating story because it's not really how I personally work (internally), so it's fun hearing someone describe just diving in like that. [this video] [LINK] It was my understanding that Racket wasn't in use anymore at Naughty Dog. It would be cool if there was an update or someone who knows (I know Dan is no longer at Naughty Dog), because unfortunately the tale of Lisps in companies i

Strong rec zzanz · 2024-09 · on “Graphics Tricks from Boomers”

I really do miss this old regime of utilizing the entire machine in games. There is a fantastic video of one of the original Naughty Dog developers talking about the optimizations they did for the original Crash Bandicoot ( [this video] ), and some of the less conventional tricks they did to enable 3D gameplay on the PS1. I've always wondered what the true limit of performance optimizations is in games. Obviously modern systems have a lot more systems to compete and share memory between, but there have been obvious cases where performance has had low priority. Also under consideration is the constantly morphing landscape of PC hardware and software architecture. Given a fixed hardware, like the P

Strong rec mscdex · 2026-06 · on “How we made hit video game Prince of Persia”

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the "War Stories" video on the making of Prince of Persia: [LINK] On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: [this video]

Recommends eindiran · 2020-03 · on “The Polygons of Another World: Atari Jaguar”

Andy Gavin has a great interview on the technical-side of developing Crash Bandicoot [0], which they wrote in GOOL, the precursor to GOAL. In fact, they wrote GOOL explicitly for Crash Bandicoot. Later, when writing Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog developed GOAL. Sony ended up buying ND -- among other things, they were hoping to use ND's code, and were quite surprised to discover that it was all written in a homebrewed Lisp dialect. You can see some GOAL here: [LINK] [0] [this video]