Crashing the Limits of 3D Technology
The technology that drives 3D gaming has evolved so far in the last few decades. Games produced at the advent of 3D gaming, which were revolutionary at the time with their highly advanced graphics, now are often regarded as ancient. Many are even somewhat painful to look at now that our newer television sets, monitors, and computers are highly equipped to show their off-putting visual artifacts and glitches in excessive high-definition.
This is exactly where Crash Bandicoot broke (or should I say “crashed”) the mold. Not only did the original game for the PlayStation make use of revolutionary 3D platforms, but it was in its own right disruptive as it pushed 3D technology and design way beyond the limits. Naughty Dog employed a slew of unconventional development hacks that allowed them to feature levels of color, world detail, and character expression that was seemingly impossible and almost entirely unique to Crash. In doing so, Crash Bandicoot set the bar high for 3D developers, and also helped employ strategies that would later become standard in games.
Breaking the Graphics Hardware
Integral to Crash’s success was Naughty Dog’s extensive research into the inner workings of the PlayStation. 3D games made around this time, the early-to-mid 90’s, were heavily restricted in two major areas: memory and polygons. This limitation applied just as much to the PlayStation; as Andy Gavin details in his interview with Ars Technica, the console’s graphics software could only draw 5,000 polygons per second, which is not many to work with if the game needs to be complex and heavily detailed. However, after a combination of hands-on experimentation and bartering for hardware information from Sony, the developers were able to learn enough about the inner workings of the PlayStation in order to come up with a workaround to this obstacle. It was discovered very quickly that the PlayStation graphics hardware, obscured by the console’s software, could potentially draw close to 120,000 polygons per second. However, Sony’s provided software libraries could not perform the mathematical operations fast enough to match that draw rate.
However, from their investigations, the developers further found that extra CPU hardware existed within the console that could calculate the math needed to render, all at a sufficient speed. Effectively, the developers “broke the rules” of the console by programming directly with the PlayStation graphics hardware rather than using Sony’s provided software libraries. This major improvement would be the major tool with which Naughty Dog would create designs that were far more detailed and stylized than other games released on this platform, as well as any other 3D games made at the time.
Innovations in Memory Management
In addition to drawing polygons, the console needed to be able to store information about all of the game’s textures, models, animations, and more. The limited memory of most computing hardware at the time presented a huge obstacle for developers at Naughty Dog. In most 3D games, players would have to wait some time for an entire level to be loaded from the game’s disk (or cartridge) into the consoles tiny memory storage. This created a lot of wasted space; each level would be compacted to the size of the device’s pitiable memory capabilities, but the data for each level would be stored on a disk with a data capacity that is multiple magnitudes higher. So, Naughty Dog creators could easily include as many scripts and assets as they desired, but they faced the issue of actually loading this content into each level.
Naughty Dog overcame this memory hurdle, along with in-depth optimizations and of “stealing” of unused memory blocks from the PlayStation itself, by simply not fully loading the current level. Instead, the content of each level is split into “chunks”, and the game only keeps the chunks needed at the current moment within the memory. All other chunks are loaded or unloaded between the disk during gameplay, rather than all at once as the level is first loaded.
This appears straightforward at a surface level, except in two aspects. Firstly, this meant that each partition of each level needed to be compressed and reorganized to fit under the memory limits of each “chunk” — the more content put into the game, the more content that needs to be fit under the constraint. Secondly, actually performing these reorganizations and whatnot was not an efficient task by any means. This is largely due to the limitations in the computing power of their development equipment. Whenever the developers wanted to verify the memory size, they had to compile and build the game’s levels, which took so long that it had to be done overnight. This meant that level tweaking had to be spread across almost the entire development lifetime of the game.
As Andy Gavin wrote in his blog Making Crash Bandicoot, “…if we made a mistake we’d make a tweak and then we’d have to repeat the process. No level was “done” till the game shipped.” Naughty Dog clearly invested heavily in maintaining the quality of what would be revolutionary graphics and animations.
Bringing Crash to Life
With this previously unimaginable hoard of resources at their disposal, Naughty Dog was able to create an even more disruptive style with which to present Crash. In particular, with all of the memory they had to work with, the animators could make more complex and stylized motions for Crash. Much of the designs throughout the game took inspiration from popular works of animation around the time, namely Looney Toons and Animaniacs. However, the traditional and more efficient methods used to animate were built for rigid puppet-like movements that were incompatible with the more bouncy and energetic style that Naughty Dog was after.
Because they had so much room to implement more resource-intensive solutions, Naughty Dog shifted their focus from using the traditional skeleton systems and towards vertex-transformation animation. With this system, rather than manipulating limbs as if they were marionettes, the game tracks the position of every vertex on Crash’s model, and moves them one-by-one. So, rather than being restricted to stiff movements, Crash could become flat when squished by a boulder, or inflate into a puffy balloon when stung by a bee. Additionally, his face became far more expressive than any other 3D character at the time, and could convey a seemingly limitless range of emotions. All of these stylizations allowed Crash and his environment to transcend the technological limitations of that era, and it is this unique aesthetic that has allowed Crash Bandicoot to age so well into the future.
The original Crash Bandicoot game for the PlayStation continues to be one of the best-selling PlayStation games of all-time. In the four years after its release, 1.5 million copies were sold in the US alone. That number rose to more than 6 million worldwide by 2003. Since then, Crash Bandicoot as a franchise has evaded mainstream popularity until only within the last few years. However, by pushing far past the restrictions of 90's-era 3D, Naughty Dog inarguably rose the standards for gaming and set a shining example to lead and inspire future developers.
More on Crash Bandicoot’s Development:
How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original PlayStation (Interview with Andy Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
Making Crash Bandicoot (Andy Gavin’s blog): https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
Other Sources:
Images From:
1: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/video-game-design-between-1990-2008/
2: http://crashland.elynx.fr/ressourcebonus/siteofficiel/c1-production.htm
