Top all-time · #646
Andy Gavin
Personal blog · all-things-andy-gavin.com · on HN as agavingamesculture
Andy Gavin's personal blog at all-things-andy-gavin.com covers games and culture. Since 2011, 97 different Hacker News readers have linked it 193 times, most often “Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 18 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andy Gavin's Crash Bandicoot making-of series, a long technical account of building the PS1 game and its Lisp dialect GOOL, which commenters call a great read.
- Recommended for · 18 comments
- Crash making-of series called great, a must-read and a very important resource; devblog called excellent.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writing, Food, Technology, and Entertainment shoved in the blender
Most-linked posts?
- Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)19 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-07-02
- Making Crash Bandicoot19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2011-02-07
- Making Crash Bandicoot (in Lisp)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-07-13
- Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2011-03-12
- Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-02-07
- /2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-02-29
- Making Crash Bandicoot3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-27
- Secrets of the Masters - An Algorithm for Learning to Program2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-11
- Crash Bandicoot as a Startup2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-02-10
- Lispings Ala John McCarthy – Andy Gavin2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-19
What Hacker News says?
For nearly two decades I was a diehard LISP advocate. I even forced all my programers to code three Crash Bandicoot and four Jak & Daxter games in custom LISP dialects that I wrote the compilers for (an article on one here http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban... ). But by the mid 2000s I started doing the kind of programming I used to do in LISP in Ruby. It's not that Ruby is a better languag…
Comment linking /2011/10/25/lispings-ala-john-mccarthy/
on “John McCarthy Has Died”Submitted Making Crash Bandicoot (2011) as a story · 249 points
HN discussionTo see how quickly HN changed in the old days, skim the feature requests thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 Some feature requests were a matter of days, like user profiles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481 A brief essay on some HN design decisions: https://pastebin.com/bSW5dfRQ (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424502 ) I think the arc codebase is worth studying and understanding, pri…
Comment linking /2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/
on “Learn how to design large-scale systems”Submitted Game of Thrones CGI as a story · 210 points
HN discussionTake a look at http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/03/making-crash-ban... as mentioned above :)
Comment linking /2011/02/03/making-crash-bandicoot-part-2/
on “How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1”Submitted So you want to be a video game programmer? - The Specs as a story · 117 points
HN discussionIf you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
on “How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1”Submitted Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL as a story · 102 points
HN discussionYes! GOOL/GOAL (see [1]) was a lisp-family language. See [2] for an explanation by the guy who developed it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp [2] - http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/
on ““It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed””Submitted How we sold a couple hundred million dollars of software in Japan as a story · 74 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy this then: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
on ““It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed””Submitted Secrets of the Masters - An Algorithm for Learning to Program as a story · 71 points
HN discussionAnd while we're on the subject of people making their own languages to make games, see also Andy Gavin. He made Game Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL) for himself and the other people at Naughty Dog to use when making Crash Bandicoot for the original PlayStation. He later made another language, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL), for the Naughty Dog game Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for the PS2. https://en.wikiped…
Comment linking /video-games/making-crash/
on “About V, the language Volt is written in”Submitted Making Crash Bandicoot as a story · 44 points
HN discussionAndy Gavin has a great series of articles on the making of crash bandicoot[0], [1]. (I'd recommend reading the entire series as it's very interesting). It seems that in order to create an immersive world on the original playstation and keep up the speed of development, iteration and dynamism required for a game he wrote his own compiler (into assembly for the playstation one) for a lisp that he created called Game O…
Comment linking /2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/
on “John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language”Submitted Crash Bandicoot - Teaching an Old Dog New Bits as a story · 38 points
HN discussionThe folk that made Crash Bandicoot were pretty clever. They figured out that the PlayStation could render untextured, shaded triangles a lot faster than textured triangles, so they "textured" the main character with pixel-scale geometry. This in turn saved them enough memory to use a higher resolution frame buffer mode. https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-ba...
Comment linking /2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/
on “Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head”Submitted Lispings ala John McCarthy as a story · 25 points
HN discussionIf you want a great and long read, Andy Gavin has a pretty extensive series about Crash Bandicoot on his blog, some entries more technical than others. I've never even played the games for more than a few minutes, but I had a great time reading through these https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/
Comment linking /video-games/making-crash/
on “GateBoy – A gate-level simulation of the original Game Boy hardware”Submitted A Video Game Programmer Origin Story as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSimilarly Andy Gavin wrote a series of blog posts about the development of Crash Bandicoot. It's more of an overview than the journals, but still interesting. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
on “Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later”Submitted Making Crash Bandicoot (2011) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionIn 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba... 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…
Comment linking /2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/
on “OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog”Submitted New Game of Thrones Season 2 Teaser as a story · 9 points
HN discussion- q7 · 2015-03-27
I think Andy Gavin already wrote up quite a lot about those details, here: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
on “Super Mario 64 HD” Submitted Crash Bandicoots 1-3 Compared - Squeezing more out of the same hardware as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFun fact: we (Naughty Dog) actually had Crash Bandicoot running on SGI workstations in high resolutions using (I think) OpenGL back in 1996. You had to use the keyboard to play, though. :) See http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/ for more making-of details. EDIT: And they were running 200Mhz MIPS CPUs - blazing fast!
Comment linking /video-games/making-crash/
on “Super Mario 64 HD”Submitted Crash Bandicoot - More Development Secrets as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWell they made it in Lisp. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...
Comment linking /2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/
on “My Hardest Bug Ever”Submitted Game of Thrones – Season 2 Trailer as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
