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

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

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 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

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

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.

I heard something similar with Jak and Daxter, where they took advantage of the embedded PS1 hardware on the PS2 to scrape together some extra performance. I very much enjoyed this video that Ars Technica did with Andy Gavin on the development of Crash Bandicoot: ▶ this video

I'm sure the commenter above has seen this but for anyone who hasn't: Andy Gavin talking about pushing the envelope of the Playstation for Crash Bandicoot. ▶ this video

There's a talk by one of the developers of Crash Bandicoot of all the hacky (and brilliant) things they had to do to get the game to load quickly off the (2X?) CD-ROM into the very limited RAM of the Playstation 1. ▶ this video

I recommend watching this: ▶ this video Naughty Dog Co-founder Andy Gavin discusses various hacks that were used on the Playstation to get Crash Bandicoot to run smoothly. The fuller version is also worth watching.

This is a cool story on how the Crash Bandicoot developers hacked toe PlayStation to get free up more memory for their game. ▶ this video