4 HN users recommended this interview2 months2020–2024score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as a fascinating hacker war story, especially in threads on Naughty Dog's custom Lisp languages GOOL and GOAL.
A two-hour extended interview in which Crash Bandicoot co-creator Andy Gavin tells how he and Jason Rubin built the game at Naughty Dog. It includes the custom Lisp tools used.
“I recently watched and loved this extended interview with him about making Crash Bandicoot” (HN, 2022)
Cool, thanks for sharing that. I had no idea Andy Garvin was on hn, but makes sense :)! I had a vague memory that Super Mario 64 also used lisp and when I googled, I found him again [0]. You've likely seen this, but I recently watched and loved this extended interview with him about making Crash Bandicoot [1]. Really made me want to look more into making video games. [0]: [link] [1]: [this video]
Making of Crash Bandicoot inspires game development
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. [link] [this video] 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).
Check out Coding Secrets. There are probably a number of videos on this channel that you might enjoy. Some of it is newer and in the 3D era but it goes back into the 8 + 16 bit days as well. [link] And his original Game Hut channel. [link] And of course, even though this is Playstation the extended interview with Andy Gavin is fascinating. [this video]
Yes it is, we are just back in 1983 in what concerns play stores. [link] Game publishers love exclusives, it means there is no way copy cats land on the same medium. For example, how Naughty Dog tried to turn Crash Bandicoot into Sony's mascot against Sega's Sonic. "Crash Bandicoot Co-Creator Andy Gavin: Extended Interview" [this video] It is ironic how disparate these kind of discussions on HN feel versus the general themes on game developer forums, magazines and conferences. Same thing with APIs, on game developer universe "what cool things can I do with it" , here "boo yet another way for the man to subjugate us" .
Found an old postmortem on Jak and Daxter from 2002 talking about pros and cons of using GOAL: [link] And Andy Gavin talked briefly about GOOL on Ars Technica Crash Bandicoot interview: [this video] It seems Naughty Dog later decided not to maintain their own Lisp and moved to Racket: [link] I am really curious about how they use Lisp nowadays.
Stealth startup | Lead mobile engineer, AI Engineer | Bay Area or LA (hybrid) | Full-time We're a stealth startup building something unbelievably ambitious in the AI space that blends AI and gaming tech - co-founders are Andy Gavin [1] (co-founder of video game developer Naughty Dog) and myself (VP @ Microsoft, Credit Karma, previously Google and Naughty Dog). Venture-backed by top investors including First Round Capital and Battery. Get in on the ground floor and work directly alongside a living legend and a small team of world-class talent. Lead Mobile Engineer - Swift and C/C++, CoreML a plus AI engineer - Finetuning/Retraining LLMs (LLama/Mixtral/etc), MLOps a plus If interested, reach out to me at: [email protected] [1] Andy Gavin on the Making of Crash Bandicoot: [this video]
Stealth startup | ML Engineer (edge inferencing) | Bay Area or LA (hybrid) | Full-time We're a stealth startup building something unbelievably ambitious in the AI space that blends AI and gaming tech - co-founders are Andy Gavin [1] (co-founder of video game developer Naughty Dog) and myself (VP @ Microsoft, Credit Karma, previously Google and Naughty Dog). Venture-backed by top investors including First Round Capital and Battery. Get in on the ground floor and work directly alongside a living legend and a dream team of world-class talent. We're looking for someone who has deep experience with CoreML and optimizing model inferencing for mobile usage (e.g. ANE on iOS). If interested, reach out to me at: [email protected] [1] Andy Gavin on the Making of Crash Bandicoot: [this video]
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