8 Impossible Games That Pushed Consoles To Their Limits

5. Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot isn't just one of the most iconic mascot platformers of all time - it's also perhaps the most mind-boggling technical marvel in the entire history of studio Naughty Dog, which is really saying something.

Developing detailed 3D environments for the original PlayStation proved enormously challenging, largely due to the limitations of the console's 2MB of system RAM.

But Naughty Dog's genius programmer Andy Gavin came up with a novel solution to defeat this issue - he divided Crash's high-detail levels into 64KB chunks which could be loaded from the game's CD drive into the RAM as needed.

Effectively, Gavin "hacked" the PS1's hardware to allow environmental detail that was, by his estimation, 20-30 times higher than was possible without finding a way to circumvent said RAM limitation.

And on top of this, he also developed a cutting edge compression algorithm to ensure that all the necessary animation data could run on the PlayStation.

Such techniques are now commonplace, but back in 1996 it was all positively revolutionary.