A little tangential/OT, but one of the things I admire about Andy Gavin and the Naughty Dog team is that they were capable of doing things on a brand new system that few ever figured out how to do.

Usually when a new system/console comes out it takes a while for developers to get used to its quirks and figure out optimizations and hacks to eke out whatever little performance gains you can under the constraints of the hardware.

One of the first games for the PS2 was Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, developed by Naughty Dog. What is remarkable is that Gavin had figured out that a lot of the assets and textures etc. that needed to be available in order to start the game could be loaded while the typical splash screens were displayed at the beginning.

I never noticed it when I played the game years ago, but I picked it up a while back and had a "wait, what?" moment when the PRESS START button appears, and instantly upon pressing it you're launched into the game and can interact with the world. No loading screen, no cutscene, just straight into the game.

Anyway, mad respect for a small team that managed to produce some of the most beloved games from that era.

Jak and Daxter is as legendary for its charm and tech as it was for its crazy tricks. The one I cherish the most is how if Jak was running to the next zone before streaming had completed loading it, Jak would just trip and fall for no apparent reason to the player.