Usually when a new system/console comes out it takes a while for developers to get used to its quirks and figure out optimizations and hacks to eke out whatever little performance gains you can under the constraints of the hardware.

One of the first games for the PS2 was Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, developed by Naughty Dog. What is remarkable is that Gavin had figured out that a lot of the assets and textures etc. that needed to be available in order to start the game could be loaded while the typical splash screens were displayed at the beginning.

I never noticed it when I played the game years ago, but I picked it up a while back and had a "wait, what?" moment when the PRESS START button appears, and instantly upon pressing it you're launched into the game and can interact with the world. No loading screen, no cutscene, just straight into the game.

Anyway, mad respect for a small team that managed to produce some of the most beloved games from that era.

The PSX had no real 3D capability, you could just throw a list of triangles at it to draw. The problem here is that you have to sort the list of triangles yourself, since there is no such thing as a z-buffer.

For Crash Bandicoot, since the path is essentially linear, they were able to pre-sort most of the triangles at build time, which allowed them to achieve greater visual fidelity compared to contemporary titles that allowed for freer movement.

This is my favorite part: https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

I thought that video included one of my favorite programming legends, and apparently a bunch of people on Reddit remembered that too. Instead, it was published on Gamasutra about a "late 90s PC title." Still very worth the quick read:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/dirty-coding-trick...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737156

( How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1) 934 points|ekianjo|10 years ago|247 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663433

How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020)

325 points|agomez314|3 years ago|71 comments

Crash Bandicoot: An oral history https://www.polygon.com/2017/6/22/15820540/crash-bandicoot-a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613982

152 points|Tomte|8 years ago|40 comments

I guess today another 10,000 people will learn about how crash bandicoot was made.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I was in video game development at the time and it was really exciting due to the switch from 2D to 3D for most games which made the math a programmer was required to know go way up in complexity.

And you hade new things called graphics cards that had their own apis to program to and drivers that didn't always do what they were supposed to do so you were always feeling around in the dark a bit when working with a new console or new graphics card. I remember so many bugs that weren't necessarily our fault, but the fault of buggy drivers or a misimplemened OpenGL call by the driver or console provider.

I couldn't imagine layering on top of that a lisp dialog to program your game in given that we were doing incredible things to shave off milliseconds. It seems counter intuitive to put a high level interpreted language ontop of that but these geniuses pulled it off!!

Great read!

One of the developers of Crash Bandicoot, Dave Baggett, is a longtime HN contributor: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmbaggett.

It was his royalties from Crash Bandicoot that enabled him to co-found/angel-invest in ITA Software, the flight search platform that Google acquired to be the foundation for Google Flights.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/david-baggett-ita-software-in...