8 Impossible Games That Pushed Consoles To Their Limits

3. Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is widely considered one of the greatest video games of all time, and though it's been lovingly remastered and remade over the years, it's still a major miracle that the original game worked on the PS2 at all.

While there's no denying that Shadow of the Colossus suffers through some performance issues on the console - namely a brutally low frame-rate at times - it's still a phenomenal achievement that a huge open-world with building-sized bosses could run on the PS2's mere 32MB of RAM.

And it sure wasn't a happy accident - Team Ico employed innumerable crafty technical tricks to get the game working. 

This included swapping-out the fidelity of environmental models depending on how close the player was to them, constantly streaming data from the game disc into the system RAM, and setting the game to run with an unlocked frame rate - hence the volatile swings in frame rate during intense boss fights.

Team Ico also programmed custom physics and lighting models that were virtually unprecedented at the time, all of this adding up to ensure that one of the PS2 era's most ambitious games could run well enough.