When you hear the name Crash Bandicoot , you probably think of it as Sony's platformy, mascoty answer to Mario and Sonic. Before getting the full Sony marketing treatment, though, the game was developer Naughty Dog's first attempt at programming a 3D platform game for Sony's brand-new PlayStation. And developing the game in 1994 and 1995—well before the release of Super Mario 64 —involved some real technical and game design challenges.

In our latest War Stories video, coder Andy Gavin walks us through a number of the tricks he used to overcome some of those challenges. Those include an advanced virtual memory swapping technique that divided massive (for the time) levels into 64KB chunks. Those chunks could be loaded independently from the slow (but high-capacity) CD drive into the scant 2MB of fast system RAM only when they were needed for Crash's immediate, on-screen environment.

The result allowed for "20 to 30 times" the level of detail of a contemporary game like Tomb Raider , which really shows when you look at the game's environments. Similar dynamic memory management techniques are now pretty standard in open-world video games, and they all owe a debt of gratitude to Gavin's work on Crash Bandicoot as a proof of concept.

Once an upstart, the Forza franchise is now firmly established within the pantheon of great racing games. The first installment was created as the Xbox's answer to Gran Turismo , but with a healthy helping of online multiplayer racing, too. Since then, it has grown with Microsoft's Xbox consoles, with more realistic graphics and ever-more accurate physics in the track-focused Forza Motorsport series as well as evolving into open-world adventuring (and even a trip to the Lego dimension ) for the Forza Horizon games.

If you're one of the millions of people who've played a Forza racing game, you're probably aware of the games' AI opponents, called "Drivatars." When the first Drivatars debuted in Forza Motorsport in 2005, they were a substantial improvement over the NPCs we raced in other driving games, which often just followed the same preprogrammed route around the track. "It was a machine-learning system on a hard drive using a Bayesian Neural Network to record [racing] lines and characteristics of how somebody drove a car," explains Dan Greenawalt, creative director of the Forza franchise at Turn 10 Studios, in our latest War Stories video.

In fact, the technology originated at Microsoft Research's outpost in Cambridge, England, where computer scientists started using neural nets to see if it was possible to get a computer to identify a Formula 1 driver by the way they drove through corners.

The year 1997 means a lot of things to me—it's not only the year I met my wife , but it's also the year wherein I sacrificed hundreds of evenings and nights to Diablo , the newly released grandpappy of loot lottery games. No game I'd played before had anything like Diablo's raw power to alter the flow of time—like, you look at the clock, see that it's a bit before midnight, you smash a couple of monsters, and then suddenly the sun is peeking through the window.

If the Lord of Destruction could be said to have a father, it would be lead designer David Brevik. Much of what would become Diablo sprang from his mind, including the name itself (taken from Mount Diablo , situated close to where Brevik lived at the time of Diablo's inception). All those lost nights and bleary-eyed mornings should properly be laid at his feet—although as Brevik originally imagined it, Diablo would be more of a traditional Rogue -esque affair of turns and sub-turn actions. Diablo's signature real-time loot-spewing combat was somewhat of a late addition—and one Brevik himself opposed.

Smash and grab

As Brevik explains, it came down to a simple show of hands in the office at the end of a long week. Brevik and perhaps two or three others wanted to keep the game turn-based, and more than a dozen others voted to convert the title into a real-time game.