10 Impossible Video Games That Shouldn't Exist

Whilst he might not necessarily get the same dues as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot is responsible for a great many things. His first outing in 1996 put Naughty Dog on the map, crafted the earliest blueprint for 3D platforming games and helped to make the original PlayStation a huge success.

However, the team had a very specific vision for Crash and his world as stylised on a “stretchy” American cartoon design rather than the awkward, robotic 3D movement of video games at the time. The memory demands of this were more than the PlayStation was built to handle.

Thus, experts at their craft, the team at Naughty Dog lead by co-founder Andy Gavin got to work at seeing what they could push out of the new system. Typically, the console would load a lump sum of 2 megabytes off the disc to use at any given moment, refreshing these between loading screens. Essentially hacking the hardware, the team taught the console’s memory unit to read a series of smaller packages of data instead.

This allowed the game to fetch only what it needed at that moment, with these packages alternating as the player moved around a level. It allowed Crash to have the smooth, unique high fidelity visual style that it did and revolutionised how consoles would read data moving forward.