How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica on HackerTube: recommended by 13 Hacker News commenters across 9 separate months, 2020–2026.
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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.
“Immensely interesting video!”
17 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
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
in “How we made hit video game Prince of Persia” · View on HN
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 “Graphics Tricks from Boomers” · View on HN
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).
in “OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog” · View on HN
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
in “Amnesia is now open source” · View on HN
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
in “Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]” · View on HN
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]
in “Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]” · View on HN
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.
in “Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis” · View on HN
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
in “Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation” · View on HN
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
in “Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp” · View on HN
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
in “Jurassic Cloud” · View on HN
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.
in “Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?” · View on HN
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
in “Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?” · View on HN
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
in “The Polygons of Another World: Atari Jaguar” · View on HN
If you'd prefer to watch a video, the author was interviewed on YouTube 5y ago: ▶ this video 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: [link]
in “Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)” · View on HN
Here's another example from a constrained environment: in Andy Gavin's interview with Ars Technica, he talks about a domain-specific compressor they made for storing Crash Bandicoot's animations, because storing each coordinate of each vertex for each frame would have been too large. ▶ this video
in “Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes” · View on HN
Nope ; Motorsport is always drivers' skills coupled with engineering ingenuity. It's always about "what can I come up with, which gives me an edge, and still somehow is within the rules?" I don't know anything about Nascar, but the history of Formula 1 is full of such little tricks as well. It's just easier to regulate "other sports" than it is to regulate sports that come coupled with a lot of technological involvement. If sth gives you an edge for half a season until rules are adjusted, that might be enough to win a championship. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but it's also exciting, and important for the whole thrill of it. Decades past Gordon Murray designed a fan quite literally sucking cars to the ground, which somehow was within regulations, because no one even considered something like that [link] In rally driving, they would sometimes come up with fake reasons for a start to be delayed, so they wouldn't have to drive in the front car's dust all the time. Audi entering with their 4-wheel car back in the days was only possible, because they pushed for a rule change and no one else really knew what was coming. Sometimes manufacturers straight up "cheated" (almost, sometimes for real) [link] ; it's a thin line, but also what makes it exciting. I would say that it's the hacker's / engineering ethos almost. What can I do within the framework? Whether it's building a bridge (to make it more stable while still following this brash design), a road car (how can I create something
in “Internal Combustion Engine” · View on HN
> no additional cost The additional cost was an enormous step up in seek time and read time, which for some games manifested as load times everywhere, and for others meant a herculean effort in managing asset streaming, per the fascinating Andy Gavin talk that Ars published a few months ago: ▶ this video
in “Accurate N64 emulation gets resolution upscaling powered by Vulkan (RetroArch)” · View on HN