How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica

memory was so short and Crash Bandicoot bad I took to stealing little bits and pieces of extra memory from the Sony libraries I would like just try erasing parts of them that I thought I wasn't using and see if things still worked kid I would mark them as available I just hacked their code by just changing the byte codes I'm like you can do this look I fixed it if they wouldn't fix it for me I was just kind of like edit their code it was free memory the memory was finite but you were definitely not supposed to do that hi I'm Andy Gavin co-founder of Naughty Dog Inc and lead programmer on crash bandicoot we set out to make the first 3d character platformer action game it do it right yeah literally act the hardware [Music] it was part of the Naughty Dog philosophy to leave no stone unturned no cycle of CPU you core GPU or byte of memory that you could use unused so if it existed there in the machine whether we were supposed to use it or not whether you had to use some crazy trick to use it or not we would figure out how to like make the most of it so in the summer of 1994 my partner Jason Rubin and I we're wrapping up way of the warrior which was our 3do fighting game and we were trying to figure out what kind of game do we want to make next the biggest genre on consoles at the time were platformer action games games like Super Mario World and all sorts of other classic 16-bit platformer games and at the same time in the arcades there was new 3d hardware and certain genres are making the transition from their traditional 2d state to 3d for example like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were still all the rage but now there was Virtua Fighter that was using 3d graphics and they were just it was clear that things were going that way new consoles they're coming out they're gonna be 3d can we make a 3d platformer game no one had ever done it we're like but it's got to happen think about that world are like speeding through is Sonic the Hedgehog doing those loop tubes in 3d what is that gonna look like prior to fall of 1994 Naughty Dog was just Jason and Andy and it was the synergy between Jace and I we boated all the creative stuff we were best of friends we were roommates and Jason was a phenomenal artist and I was a game programmer I think a pretty good one between the two of us like he would try to make it like look incredible I would try to make the technology really work and we both trying to make it really fun Jason I had sold the distribution publishing rights for a way the warrior to Universal Studios to a new unit called you know Universal interactive they're basically like come out to California move on to the universals lot next to Steven Spielberg and we'll give you like a bungalow for free and utilities for free you can just do whatever you want and all you do is show it to us how'd the dog and ourselves into my Honda Accord and we drove across country so we have lots of time to talk so we're like well what would it be really like to do a platformer in 3d we're talking about like Sonic the Hedgehog well imagine you're going through loops you're running and you're jumping platforms or collecting stuff and 3d the camera is always behind you you see the world and that looks all great but it's like the Sonics ask game all you do is see Sonic's ass but the front of the character is where the expression is could we do levels where you come at the camera but how are you gonna see where you're going these eventually led actually to the boulder levels in crash bandicoot should we do level sideways should he look over his shoulder towards the screen were simultaneously designing the game that became crash bandicoot and sort of shopping for a platform for it we knew because it was going to be a 3d game we wanted to do something on one of the new 32-bit platforms so there's the 3d out which we'd already made a game on but the machine was sort of clunky half 3d machine it was also very expensive and wasn't selling very well then there was the atari jaguar we just sort of took it's a bit of a joke and then you had the big guys all about to release new machines you had some mystery machine from nintendo but we had no way of knowing what nintendo was up to the space thing he didn't talk to Americans Sega had two things going on they had the 32x which was coming out that fall which was some kind of like way in which you souped up the Genesis then they're making this new machine that I don't remember if it was called the Saturn yet or but it became the Saturn and then there was this wild card Sony they hadn't done video games before we heard they had this like powerful new machine so we contacted both Sega and Sony and got the information on the machines which they gave a do you sign your life away and their firstborn and all that and then you could order the machines if you gave him the deposit and stuff and then Sony had this new machine which was like all 3d could do TD pretty well too and it was like a new clean design very similar to high-end commercial 3d hardware like the Silicon Graphics hardware but with a bunch of simplifications to make it much more economic and there are two main custom chips in the in the playstation 1 a graphics you know instead of custom mips CBO but the GPUs today are wildly more complicated they also do a lot of the math work that old GPUs and I used to not do places 1 GPU just drew triangles on the screen but it was pretty good at it he could draw about 120,000 polygons a second of triangles which was phenomenal if you were using a PC at the time they had no 3d graphics hardware they had like eg 8 boards you'd be lucky to get a couple hundred polygons because you have to all in software but here is the PlayStation which was gonna be like $1.99 $2.99 whatever it was and it was like a complete machine with a CD drive and with the memory and everything console machines that compared to PCs at the time a world of difference we're talking Windows 3.1 and dos to run a game you had usually how to have a boot disk with like custom autoexec batch and config sis and you had to open up your machine this was not a very game friendly world on PCs a PlayStation or Genesis or a Super Nintendo you just shoved in the cartridge of the CD pushed on boom booted I liked the Sony best it was neat and clean and powerful and intended for 3d I really thought it was the only one of those machines that actually do what we were sort of like aiming so the core idea behind crash bandicoot as a game he was gonna have a mechanic like a game like donkey kong country you were gonna go through levels with successive timing challenges and enemies and jumpsuit was gonna be platforming and it was gonna have a cartoony animal character and we wanted to not make it look like a video game exactly we wanted to look like a Looney Tunes cartoon where the character was highly animated fluid if he got mushed by a giant stone roller he got turned into a flat thing then wobbled around we wanted a world that like looked like a cartoon world with kind of sensibility that was classic cartoons or sort of it was being reinvented at the time with TV shows like ducktales Simpsons was big animation was cool again and crashed one in a frame they were 30 frames a second we got about 1500 polygons great 600 them went to crash that's how important he was to us like most people they'd use like 80 and so their characters would look like weird walking blocks we wanted to look like a real cartoon character that required a lot of detail so he gets a third of the entire budget with crash we were forging into new ground everywhere like no one had ever made a 3d platformer action game well it was completely obvious that pcs which were the standard thing that people use for development machines we're just not gonna cut it now against Windows 3:1 and no 3d graphics and the things had like effectively 640k of RAM we made the plunge to buy for everyone in the company which was about five people this at the stage silicon graphics workstation it's mostly in to go to extremes these are like 75 to $100,000 workstations they had 3d graphics the software to do the 3d graphics was also like about $75,000 per machine this is what people had done in recent very recent memory of the time Terminator 2 or the abyss or even Jurassic Park on and so we settled on using as a software alias power animator just one of the three choices at the time so we got this like clunky big box which was later Lee PlayStation prototype and it turned out to be a pretty good machine but first you gotta like understand it comes with a bunch like a bunch of manuals which are incredibly badly translated from the Japanese and are mysterious and you'd have amusing debates between the programmers what they actually meant by the funny choice of English words the way to really figure out what's new is to test things empirically you do that by taking the individual pieces and you write test code to do certain things on the machine and put it through its paces it's like you know taking a car out on the track and seeing how fast it can actually corner there's a bunch of different graphics modes and so it's like half speed in the high resolution mode why in the mid resolution mode which was clearly just sort of an afterthought it's the same speed as the low resolution mode Jason already made this crash bandicoot character who looks pretty much the same as the final crash bandicoot character and so I had that draw on the screen and we shrank it down to about the size it would be on the screen I ran some code to actually calculate the number of pixels that each of his polygons occupied on the screen and turned out they were like like 1.2 pixels so like well why would we texture these polygons we decide for characters let's not use the texture mode let's just use the faster easier to use shaded mode which most people didn't do most people just use textures and part of this is because we ran the tests and found that the tanaan texture mode ran twice as fast like if you didn't run the tests you just sort of like use the numbers in the book it just gave you one number you know so we figured out that playstation can actually draw a pretty decent number of polygons per second from the graphics software but you have to do the math to figure out where those polygons are gonna be these days like almost every computer and even your phone have advanced GPUs and they have vertex units and they do tremendous numbers gigaflops often of multiply ads but in those days like most computers just did multiplies and adds one at a time on the cpu and they could do like hundreds or thousands not billions this was a serious problem there was this fundamental problem in the the PlayStation sort of hardware software interaction where it's math side was just not up to snuff but we kind of knew that this was a software issue that like Sony just wanted us to use these libraries like that they had written but they weren't really like using the machine to its fullest somewhere in here the designers had put hardware that was designed to do multiply ads because you need to do millions of them but this was all hidden behind a bunch of like C programming language libraries that Sony had wish you gave them the numbers and it multiplied added them and those things performed terribly well the graphs unit could get a hundred 120,000 somewhere in that range polygons per second draw and the libraries could only transform the math for them for maybe like five thousand ten thousand which was just not going to cut it so the base tested performance on vertex math on the PlayStation one using the official Sony way of doing it their graphics libraries was like at least an order of magnitude off like 1/10 of what it should be just didn't run fast enough we kind of did what any sort of good scientist does and you just sort of take it apart and got enough of that figured out that I knew that there was like actually some real horsepower in there but they were kind of like hiding it away with that particular problem through a series of campaigns through some of the guys in new and Sony the creative solution on both decided to turn out to be here's how it works two pieces of papers slid across the desk you didn't hear it from me but that was actually enough we just sort of systematically worked through what was on there and it turned out that there was this little sort of math side brain it's called a coprocessor inside Sony's custom CPU which actually could do this very specific limited math that was needed to do the vertex transformation and could actually do it just about the speed that the GPU could consume it in pretty much every dedicated gaming hardware since the beginning of arcade games there's always been - pretty much always their main brands you've got the graphics unit and you got the CPU CPU is likely to get old CPUs move individual numbers and that allows them to do anything the computers can do but they it's like they have one thought at a time the graphics change because graphics is a more game specific area it was some way in which it renders its graphics like in Hardware early 80s games even some we got Galaga or whatever like the aliens are sweeping down those are what are called sprites and the CPUs of the time could not draw sprites these little graphics units we're designed to do sprites and scrolling backgrounds basically all of computer graphics technology has been driven by the video game but you always have this balance in these machines between their sort of graphics brain and their sort of general math brand graphics units nowadays can do in parallel sometimes thousands of these same operations and that's why the actual sort of processing power on a GPU is way more than the CPU like they have many gigaflops in teraflops on some of them but they don't do as general stuff let me step back and explain gameplay in the treaty platform let's take Donkey Kong Country you can move forward and backward in the levels on the left or right and you can jump up and down or jump up on the platform but essentially it's kind of linear usually go to the right and obstacles come to you this goes all the way back to like pitfall in like 1980 you might swing on a vine swing over so a bunch of spiky things monsters may be crawling on the platforms or be useful eyeing above it's a linear progression you can see where you're going and it's sort of very fast-paced it's like jump jump strike jump jump strike so it's all kind of nicely lined up in 2d the designer measures out this almost rhythmic musical progression of gaming this is one of things that makes these games really addictive and fun your progress in getting better at the game is to first learn the controls to get good at being Donkey Kong and then to learn the specific movements of the enemies and the objects in the level and sort of memorize a route it's almost like playing back like in a rhythm game but in 3d everything's different you've added an extra dimension you've now got this side to side too if you've got in Duncan country Mario whatever if three turtles are coming at you you have to jump over or kill or knock away each of the Shirelles in succession in 3d you can just go to the right and avoid them entirely you've added a whole extra dimension to the space and so there's too much empty space and this had the effect of sort of diluting the ratio between choice and conflict we had to figure out how to compensate for this in order to maintain the intense action pace [Music] we have this realization that basically we had added dimension so the simplest strategy was take out the dimension but take out different dimensions in in some way an example of that was say like the boulder level the dimension were actually taking out there this time it's not one of the three spatial dimensions because of the hairy nature of it that the boulder is going to smoosh you if you don't move like now now now you don't have the luxury to pick around those other dimensions so it drives you through the otherwise sparser thing so fast that it feels just as intense and the hog level is a reverse of this but instead of the thing moving you you keep moving into things like you're on the hog and you can't control how fast he goes he's a wild hog and you have to navigate you know really mostly left and right and then we had the more normal 3d level in something insanity Beach we put walls of jungle up in order to sort of narrow that dimension down not fully but partially and then there's other things to help narrow down by for example the enemies say like a crab or skunk in those levels they track you it doesn't mean we can't use the new adventure when we wanted to because you can box on the left a box on the right and then you can make interesting things where they have to choose to face this peril and go over to that box or if you're in like something like hog wild we would deliberately do this there might be that the spiky thing is over on the left with a box and the clear path is on the right so the simple way to survive that that obstacle is to go all the way over the right mr. I passed the spiky thing then you leave the Box unbroke it hit the box you have to like go to the last minute right in front of us by getting this slide over so it gives you this a choice or timing elements like on some of those 3d in outside levels like the rollers in there and then you can tie them together things like you got these roller ones and then you have like a platform for as you have to jump but then you can add to the tension by making the platform like drop it's like a time platform you get out and it goes and then drops then we have other format levels where we took away a dimension for example there's a bunch of levels that are kind of like say the wall it's essentially kinda 2d and you can come up and come out but we've just made a somewhat 2d level by fixing camera looking to the side and then there's another type of level where cameras up like this and crash moves in a sort of grid but there's not too much play with up and down and instead of being wide open you're above something deadly on walkways in each of these cases we're like from adding constraints or removing areas of three degrees of freedom to try to narrow it down and increase the intensity because we have this extra dimension the game is more varied than a traditional 2d one would be because we're removing different dimensions of different levels we have like seven ten different strategies for removing dimensionality boxes - actually we're designed to fill in the void there's not actually that many enemies on screen because we couldn't support that many but we filled in the empty spaces to a large extent with with boxes and then they can drop down in the stacks and create puzzles out of and so they had four what's a simple object you know a few polygons and a few rules they're incredibly versatile we totally knew we wanted to do this kind of animation never really been seen in videogames like instead of the new tune style distorting animation it's a very stretchy rubbery style of animation which was done in traditional cel animation that meant that characters had to really animate traditionally into the low polygon 90s graphics you would make your characters by constructing a very small number of bones upper arm bone lower arm bone head bone and you would stick all of the art that pertain to that character's upper right leg on the upper right leg bone and the bone was like a rigid thing it was like a joint it could be rotated or moved it could kind of go like and if you want fingers you had to have like lots of bones that was just too much math for the places channel we just knew it could never handle tons of bones and you certainly couldn't do something like say he gets his hand hit by hammer in a cartoon well what happens it swells up like a balloon or it gets flattened into a pancake and it's something like that we just couldn't do that at all with the whole bones a game like Virtua Fighter in the arcade used to consequences now this worked okay for fighting in because there's not a lot of ton of deformation but the character is a little stiff with bones it's almost impossible or very difficult to do facial animation - and we knew we really want a facial animation what kind of cartoon character doesn't like smirk or wink is it even possible to get that kind of animation like on a silicon graphics workstation so Jason like made this crash model and he said about trying to do cool and wacky animations with him and he found with some work you could get the power animator to actually do it because it had these sophisticated like bone and vertice weighting tools and these distortion fields and like the way that power animator did those things was just not possible on the PlayStation these are all things that used the expensive floating-point hardware that was on the silicon graphics workstation and it couldn't even do them in real time it had a render them but a video game is real time you have to do everything in a thirtieth of a second so this was another big problem because he wanted that animation really really bad I'm like well we can read the positions of all the vertices if you know where the positions of all the vertices are in every frame then it doesn't matter what kind of bones the SGI can use a thousand bones and it's all the same you're destroying the polygons and they're vertice positions and it can be done even quite fast you don't have to do any bone work like so you don't have to spend any CPU on those but the problem with that strategy is then you have an animation where it's 30 frames a second and crashes like 500 vertices maybe like 600 polygons you got to store the position in every frame animation for every vertex that's a lot of data but at the same time we also are already committed down this crazy memory strategy to 30-fold our data so well we can handle a bit more data than other people can so we would bake down the animation data using all of Jason's fancy effects and our animator I did it and it worked because the the PlayStation development unit had like 8 or 32 Meg's of memory like so you could have a much bigger thing than then would ever work on the real machine so we're working with this for months and always I'm thinking we're gonna have to fit it in there somehow it's just so huge it's gonna have to get smaller but it had this hunch that there really wasn't so much data in a mathematical sense that we could write a domain-specific compressor it's called for this so what that means is data in a sort of computer science theory has a certain complexity there's a pattern to it and limits to it and with like the animation data it can tolerate some data loss this same theory is why JPEG works YJ JPEG totally changed the internet and toys unit our images are still the JPEG you transform the image into frequency space a difficult mathematical transform and you throw away the high frequency chunk lip it back and depending on how much junk you throw away it looks better or worse but it's still like the most important parts of the image and it got like 120 of the 30 of the size because you took out the unimportant stuff but I was pretty convinced that this animation data was like that that you could take out the high frequency information you know like a vertex is waste it wouldn't move up and down that much marker this program working analyze he took a bunch of the animations and it analyzed every component of every vertex and calculated the kind of the dynamic range or the amount of change that occurred across animations and how then indeed the information change was quite low like like they just didn't do much so it turned out we could use this very specialized thing where it would analyze a particular animation and then it would figure out the range that all these things that would have a map at the beginning that said to like vertex 7y low information so it only needs 2 bits and it moves over this range and this one needs this many bits the end was something like fifty or eighty to one compression like the data got like you 50th the size in looking at the original playstation one design while it was well-designed in balance the machine had two megabytes of ram and one megabyte a VRAM but it also had the CD drive which was six hundred forty megabytes of read-only storage and that's a lot more the ratio is very big so I had the theory it would be possible to make levels much bigger than two megabytes ignore in a normal game am getting like twisted metal or something you go to the Eiffel Tower level and it would load the Eiffel Tower level into say one memory so they would have a certain amount of art in animation it was about 1 megabytes worth now you could do various things to try to squeeze that down there's no way getting around this basically and people didn't really try here's how it basically works so the computer the CPU and the GPU can only really access stuff in the memory right now every 30th of a second in a videogame is a right now render my frame anything you're actually going to draw right the animation you're going to be using right now any sound you're gonna play right now has to be because you can get to the memory quickly the CD takes about of a third of a second to move its head to any specific spot on the CD it takes some time to actually load the data it could load a megabyte in maybe six seconds or something so you can't just go draw one frame and go get a new different megabyte off the disk because it's gonna take you eight seconds to get that different megabyte off the disk well what are you gonna do to sit there do nothing for you seconds you can do that between levels one level switches that's why a typical game would go to a loading screen and they'd load that whole megabyte or whatever off the MS the CD is just a further storage it's bigger but it's slower it's further away from being able to use it why can't you use it it's there on an early PlayStation game they have like one megabyte levels or two megabyte levels and the C is 640 well that means they could fit three hundred levels off of the CD did they have 300 levels now that's two that would take them like ten years to make the game so then to get the CDs just mostly empty or they fill it all the music because music is kind of back video or something but you know a lot of times it's just empty games like twisted metal that'll be 50 minutes and so every games levels were gonna look like roughly a half and that was sufficient many many PlayStation games were made but it was part of my theory that they didn't have to be so my idea was that I would use advanced virtual memory techniques to swap chunks of data in and out from the dead like basically so if the level was let's call it 30 megabytes well maybe you only need at any one moment in time one megabyte but the level is actually 30 minutes I would chunk the entire level into 64 K pages and then there were chunks of data that could be something anything animations of crash code a piece of background chunks had to be less than 64 K like it piled them in until the page was almost fall but they couldn't go up across pages or you have to break the chunks into smaller chunks then the level consisted of 30 Meg's of pages 16 18 pages that could fit in memory so the problem is can I arrange the chunks in the level such that at any one point in level I never need more than 16 pages worth of data and you can actually take the same chunk duplicate it into multiple pages if that makes the whole puzzle work out better the game is constantly it's it's figure this out in advance but it's come sorry figuring out which pages it's gonna load in if you're going this way which pages you're loading you're going that way and it throws away old pages that it doesn't need and loads new ones into their place any page can place any other page as long as you never need more than 16 active ones at once crushed textures are all pretty sharp with a lot of color and detail and tomb Raider's are like all washed out and pixel II and whatever guys have so much memory they don't have any place to put all that extra texture we had 20 30 times the amount of space for it or the number of polygons the level is something like tomb raider it's pretty blocky like square corridors and whatever and crash has like weird shape somewhere because many more polygons there were a bunch of different technologies that serve this but the memory was a huge one so this was one of my set of like patching a whole bunch of patents in it on this actually I was definitely one of the first people to see that you could really use that storage on the CDE or the disk drive it really matter as like a dynamic part of your game just until it's done all the time you're not plumber boy the Bandicoot loop get you now I think one of the core legacies of Crash Bandicoot is that games can have their own distinct stylistic personality and art style and yes to some extent many did before every Mario has its own sad amorous dog but it's very much an old-timey video game style but fresh had its own consistent whirl which draws obviously from an American cartoon style and so but the entire crash product by that I mean our first four games are consistent within that style that the original still played quite well they still look pretty good even like on a Playstation one because the style sort of transcends the specifics of the pixels early on and make it we had this totally arrogant half Hope half idea and it was another major factor in choosing the PlayStation was that Nintendo has Mario and Sega has Sonic Sony doesn't seem to have a mascot so if we make a mascot game style game on the Saturday machine like we might not have the same competition and then there was this fairly immediate buzz where where they're like we have to have this game like we have to make sure it's like only on the PlayStation and like we deliberately set up to be in the position to maybe do it and then we sort of instigated it but that it worked out was a kind of miraculous but our dream was to become the mascot now Sonny never even even they bought it they never like officially they're like oh it's not a mascot we don't have a mascot like a member but like everyone assumed it was a mascot and they got so behind it that they just bought the rights from Universal Crash Bandicoot started off selling well but it just kept on going and going and going the crash better get the first one sold better in its second year maybe this third year and I'm pretty sure that when we shipped CTR in the Christmas week of CTR Crash Bandicoot 1 sold more copies in that week that had ever sold previously first of all it was a really broad appeal game like everyone could kind of whether you were a young kid or your hardcore gamer it wasn't highly violent but the characters were appealing it was funny and gameplay was like pretty intense and approachable so you could just sit down and play and this is one of the things that we really wanted before it I wanted to give it you didn't have to think too hard about Crash Bandicoot was really the crucible in which the Naughty Dog philosophy was forged that every element that goes into the game needs to be great because we wanted to make a truly great game a game that was gonna be a hit a classic in order to do that we we came to believe that everything in it had to be great then you needed the best technology possible to make all that happen to better your technology the better the game could feel the better it could look if you got enough of these things all right you could sort of transcend mediocrity to become like a gaming masterpiece you

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 2,139,706

Rating: 4.9596324 out of 5

Keywords: playstation, naughty dog, war stories, crash bandicoot, sony playstation, war stories crash bandicoot, naughty dog crash bandicoot, crash bandicoot game, crash bandicoot sony, crash bandicoot interview, crash bandicoot oral history, crash bandicoot war stories, naughty dog war stories, playstation war stories, andy gavin, naughty dog andy gavin, andy gavin crash bandicoot, andy gavin ars technica, jason rubin, jason rubin crash bandicoot, ars, ars technica, technology

Id: izxXGuVL21o

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kryten2k35]

Man, Ars really knocked it out of the park with these War Stories series. I've really enjoyed each one so far.

The one on Oddworld Abe's Oddysee was fantastic

[u/Krunkworx]

I remember when I first got my PlayStation and this game was included. Seeing the graphics blew me away. Still to this day it still looks good. Great job Naughty Dog!

[u/ApeOxMan]

I grew up loving this game but I have so much more appreciation for it now. That guy knows his stuff and he explained pretty complicated things simply. I didn't realize how much ingenuity it took to make this game work.

[u/dadsboner]

I'm so glad I watched this. He is a very smart man.

[u/etnoJoe]

I bought the remastered collection for ps4. Does anyone else remember it being such a hard game?

[u/aerkenemesis]

This technique predates the PS1 by at least 10 years. I remember on my old Amigas that copied the OS from a ROM chip onto RAM you could essentially just overwrite all of it if you didn't use the libraries it provided. People did this particularly in the demo scene, the OS loaded from ROM into RAM would load a couple of sectors from the floppy drive into RAM, then you would overwrite the OS partition of the RAM and write your own floppy decoder to load the rest of the data into RAM as it was needed. You could also overwrite previous parts of RAM that you'd already executed.

So basically the ram worked as a moving window view of the floppy disk(s).

Edit: they had 512kB of RAM and a floppy disk was 880kB.

[u/strictlyphotonic]

He wrote a lengthy blog about the process here https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

I appreciate the level of detail in these posts, but he really tries to shit over rival games from the same era.

[u/ViralGameover]

Used to play this game all the time as a kid, all 3 of them. Never had a memory card though so I would play each of them for about an hour at a time and see how far I could get before having to start over.

Last night I finally got every achievement, now at 20 years old. That last time trial was a bittersweet moment.

[u/cptzaprowsdower]

The Ars Technica YouTube channel is on another level. Love what they're doing.