Ars Technica
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2020–2024
2:13:40 · 246K views · Mar 26, 2020
A two-hour extended interview in which Crash Bandicoot co-creator Andy Gavin tells how he and Jason Rubin built the game at Naughty Dog. It includes the custom Lisp tools used.
HN recommends it as a fascinating hacker war story, especially in threads on Naughty Dog's custom Lisp languages GOOL and GOAL.
8 comments from Hacker News
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. [LINK] this video 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).
Cool, thanks for sharing that. I had no idea Andy Garvin was on hn, but makes sense :)! I had a vague memory that Super Mario 64 also used lisp and when I googled, I found him again [0]. You've likely seen this, but I recently watched and loved this extended interview with him about making Crash Bandicoot [1]. Really made me want to look more into making video games. [0]: [LINK] [1]: this video
Check out Coding Secrets. There are probably a number of videos on this channel that you might enjoy. Some of it is newer and in the 3D era but it goes back into the 8 + 16 bit days as well. [LINK] And his original Game Hut channel. [LINK] And of course, even though this is Playstation the extended interview with Andy Gavin is fascinating. this video
The ars technica extended interview with Andy Gavin is a great watch (mentions lisp from his time at MIT) this video
Stealth startup | Lead mobile engineer, AI Engineer | Bay Area or LA (hybrid) | Full-time We're a stealth startup building something unbelievably ambitious in the AI space that blends AI and gaming tech - co-founders are Andy Gavin [1] (co-founder of video game developer Naughty Dog) and myself (VP @ Microsoft, Credit Karma, previously Google and Naughty Dog). Venture-backed by top investors including First Round Capital and Battery. Get in on the ground floor and work directly alongside a living legend and a small team of world-class talent. Lead Mobile Engineer - Swift and C/C++, CoreML a plus AI engineer - Finetuning/Retraining LLMs (LLama/Mixtral/etc), MLOps a plus If interested, reach out to me at: scott@persona-ai.ai [1] Andy Gavin on the Making of Crash Bandicoot: this video