Crash Bandicoot: An oral history | Hacker News Reader

Crash Bandicoot: An oral history

polygon.com

152 pointsTomte40 comments

Andy Gavin wrote a series on the creation of Crash Bandicoot [1]. It covers some of the intricate details and compromises of developing for the Playstation. It's one of my favorite pieces of writing, definitely recommend it to anyone who likes development articles.

[1] http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

As someone who never played Crash Bandicoot, I immediately did a text search for "Baggett" to see if Dave Baggett mentions the bug that literally comes up in every online discussion about craziest debugging stories ever [0] and is the first thing I think about when I hear Crash Bandicoot mentioned. Surprisingly, it doesn't, but Baggett has a bunch of other interesting anecdotes about his work. CB doesn't look like my type of game, but ever since buying a PS4 (had a PS2 previously), I've snapped up Naughty Dog games based on my high estimation of their development quality (and, well, the high review scores that their games always seem to get).

[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M...

forgot this story; archived link in case https://archive.fo/QNut8

On a related note, Dave Baggett is also the co-founder of ITA which sold to Google for a reported 700 million.

Yeah, everything I've read from him has been interesting/inspiring. I even joined Quora because that seems to be his social media platform of choice (or was, at the time):

https://www.quora.com/profile/Dave-Baggett

He's been on HN a few times in the past too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmbaggett

If you're into Naughty Dog games you should try Jak and Daxter at some point. It is, however, a platformer.

Thanks for the link, I had somehow missed that story. I think for a digital hardware engineer, bugs like that are not particularly strange. As software people we are usually shielded from it, because the hardware we are using has been thoroughly tested. Working with embedded software, you are often one of the first people to write code for a particular bit of hardware, and have to watch out for these things. On the other hand, it is tempting to blame the hardware for all mysterious bugs, and the hw engineers do not appreciate that much.

Dave Baggett wrote a couple of nice text adventures for the TADS system before he worked on Crash back in the early 1990s, I remember enjoying both "Unnkulian Unventure II: The Secret of Acme" and "The Legend Lives!" (Unnkulian episode 5)... and I also remember some fun conversations on natural language text parsing with him back on rec.arts.int-fiction in the same time period.

Not mentioned: written in Allegro Common Lisp (for the IDE on SGIs) and Scheme/GOOL running on the Playstation.

I was waiting for the first lisp-related comment. You win, lispm.

The new remaster is a completely new engine apparently, so it's gone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/6imvro/a_remaster_wi...

Had to be recreated without access to the original source code? How sad.

Most of the source would have been fairly useless for the project anyway, but it would have been neat to see them write a new GOOL interpreter or compiler and reuse a large part of the original game logic.

I can't even begin to imagine the nightmare writing such a thing would be, and then trying make sure it worked correctly...

further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Giant Bomb did a great interview with one of the longtime Naughty Dog devs where he talks about the old Crash and Jax engine: https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/an-uncharted-tech-retrospec...

Man, if it weren't for Mario 64 and what a game changer that game was, perhaps more people would remember Crash Bandicoot and that it was a pretty good game in its own right.

>That was just Crash 1. Two was even worse! [Laughs] Three was pretty bad, too. For me, from August of '94 to December of '98 was one entire, giant crunch.

What a waste. I can't really think of any game or game series that would be worth four years of crunch.

Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste? Especially in this case, where Andy and Jason went from what's called now "indie" (the last game they've made before Crash was the Way of the Warrior[1]) straight into the big AAA. Most people in the games industry won't ever have a chance to do this.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Ya4mSkDMI

> Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste?

If I was required to do it for 16 hours a day every day, hell yes I would.

Some people's hobbies are things like mountain climbing or sailing. Those take many days/months at 24 hour a day. Some even do multi-day camping/skiing trips. Some even do vacations in other countries. These are all 24 hour a day.

But not for 4 years straight without a break?

Nobody works 16 hours a day for 4 years straight without a break.

Nobody enjoys crunch time. No one sleeps under their desk for three months, seeing their family one day a week, and thinks "I'm living the dream". They go along with it because they believe it's necessary to continue their career in gaming.

People are different. I for one cannot imagine somebody enjoying running a supermarathon. I cannot imagine enjoying running any distance, tbqh. Yet, I see people running on the streets and read about people doing crazy running events and training for marathons etc. Do they do this to advance their career in running? I have no idea. Seeing the vast majority of them not getting paid anything and only spending money on running equipment I'd say they are pretty stupid if they do.

On the other hand, I know that some people enjoy making games. I am one of them. I had stayed up 30+ hours few times chasing bugs not because somebody forced me but because it's more fun than sit at home and watch TV (or run, or make ships in a bottle or whatever people with different hobbies do in their free time). You don't believe it's possible to enjoy your job? If it's true, it's pretty sad actually.

Of course it's possible to enjoy your job. I never said otherwise. If people weren't passionate about making games they'd never put up with crunch time. And certainly I've enjoyed caffeine-fueled multi-day hacking sessions.

I have never heard of anyone who claims to enjoy extended crunch time. There might be an outlier somewhere, but I doubt even that exists. At best there's a shared sense of exhausted accomplishment when you're finally done. (Unless you get laid off as soon as the game ships.)

Crunch is not why people make games. Crunch is the price you have to pay to keep making games. Or at least that's what the people who make the schedule say.

It seems to me you are implying that somebody put extended crunch time on Andy Gavin and he had to put up wit it? Please look up who is he.

Not really the point. Read the section OP quoted, "YOU JUST DIDN'T LEAVE". Do any of those people sound like crunch was fun to them? They liked working on the game, and some of them reminisce about the crunch time like old soldiers telling war stories, but I don't see any positive adjectives in there. About the nicest thing anybody said was "when you're young you don't feel it that much," which is pretty faint praise.

I replied to the comment quoting Andy specifically. Other people might be having different opinions. I am sure there are people who hate crunch and some at the Naughty Dog might be them. There are tons of such people in EA or working on the Aplle's factory in China for sure but I am not discussing their opinions, which were not mentioned in this thread.

Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic."

"giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?

Perhaps it was another term for gouraud shading?

I assumed the name didn't translate if the interview was face-to-face. He did mention using "the shaded mode" instead of the textured mode.

Almost certainly a transcription error, since "giro" is fairly close to the pronunciation of gouraud.

Google has five results for "giro shading" and four of them are this article, so I doubt that's a common name. It sounds like he's talking about untextured polygons with smoothing applied to hide the edges; the result tended to look like smooth, shiny plastic, without the usual sharp pixelation of low-res textures and low-poly models. It was definitely a common effect in the early '90s, though I mainly remember it from the N64, particularly Super Mario 64 and similar cartoony mascot games.

Edit: Kierenelby is right, he meant "gouraud shading". Here's an example: http://imgur.com/h8vNeaD It's pretty distinctive because a gouraud-shaded ball mostly looks like a sphere, but the outline is clearly polygonal, and the surface highlights follow the otherwise-hidden polygon edges in a weird way.

This makes me want to look up the history of Earthworm Jim, because Sega & surrealism.

You might also be interested in the backstory of the video game Ecco The Dolphin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUvhUK8Dv8

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