Naughty Dog streamed Crash Bandicoot's levels in 64KB chunks to fit the PS1's 2MB RAM

In 1994 and 1995, Naughty Dog programmer Andy Gavin built Crash Bandicoot, the studio's first 3D platform game, for Sony's brand-new PlayStation. The console offered a scant 2MB of fast system RAM and a slow but high-capacity CD drive, and the levels were massive for the time. In an Ars Technica War Stories video interview, Gavin walked through how he overcame the mismatch.

The core trick was an advanced virtual memory swapping technique: each level was divided into 64KB chunks that loaded independently from the CD only when they were needed for Crash's immediate on-screen environment. The result, Gavin said, was 20 to 30 times the level of detail of a contemporary game like Tomb Raider.

Expressive Warner Bros.-style animation was the second battle. Crash got 600 of the 1,500 polygons the PlayStation rendered per frame, but standard skeletal 3D animation looked too robotic. So the team pre-baked and stored positional animation data for all 500 vertices across every animation, and wrote a custom compression algorithm that discarded data for vertices that did not move much — a 50 or 80 to 1 compression, by Gavin's recollection. The team also hacked the PlayStation's built-in code libraries to maximize available memory and math speed on the largely untested hardware.

The PlayStation had only 2MB of RAM, so no whole level could ever fit — chunked streaming from the CD was the only way to get the detail Rubin's art demanded.

The CD drive was slow but high-capacity, which made it viable as a swap device once data was shaped into independent 64KB slices.

Skeletal animation of the day looked robotic; pre-baking per-vertex positions bought cartoon squash-and-stretch at the cost of huge data, which only custom compression could fit.

Hacking Sony's built-in code libraries squeezed out extra memory and mathematical speed on hardware nobody had shipped on before.

When the platform cannot hold your world, restructure the data so only the visible slice must be resident — chunk-streaming from slow storage, now standard in open-world games.

Crash Bandicoot launched in September 1996 and became Sony's mascot-scale answer to Mario and Sonic, per Ars Technica. Similar dynamic memory management techniques are now standard in open-world video games, and the outlet credits Gavin's Crash work as their proof of concept.