Ars Technica
13 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2020–2026
31:37 · 5.2M views · Feb 27, 2020
In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.
It is one of the most frequently recommended videos on HN for old-school game development hacks under tight hardware constraints.
17 comments from Hacker News
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 PS5 or Xbox, with the hardware of a high end gaming computer, what is the true limit a game could reach.
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 is normally that it eventually gets replaced or set aside (where new stuff is built in something else).
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.
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
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