Jak & Daxter was a very good, technically impressive 3D platformer that came out in the early 2000s for the Playstation 2. It was developed by an American studio called Naughty Dog, who was famous for previously making the Crash Bandicoot games and has since gone on to make the acclaimed Uncharted and Last of Us games.
Certain kinds of techies were particularly enamoured with Jak & Daxter because, at a time when console devs rarely spoke much about the tech behind their stuff, and at a time when games were almost universally programmed in C/C++ with bits of assembly language, the developers of Jak & Daxter openly discussed how they had written the bulk of the game logic in a custom Lisp dialect they called GOAL, which itself was built with Common Lisp. If you don't know what Lisp is or understand why that's cool, well - Lisp is a very interesting programming language that pioneered a lot of incredible ideas in computer science and that certain hackers develop a real connection to, including one of the biggest names behind this site/Y Combinator, but has always struggled a bit in the market. Seeing it used in a AAA game production like this was, for those hackers, really exciting; maybe because it might be the beginning of an industry-wide move towards Lisp (which never happened), or maybe just because a Lisp success story like this was vindicating.
This appears to be a (work-in-progress) source port of the game and the GOAL language, produced with a lot of reverse engineering work. So it's neat to finally get to see first-hand this GOAL Lisp stuff that we've heard about for years, and if the project reaches completion it'd also make for a great way to play the game on modern hardware or mod it.
Thanks! I loved playing this game growing up. I had heard later on that it was a technical achievement, but didn't realize they made their own dialect of Lisp.
wk_end|4 years ago
Certain kinds of techies were particularly enamoured with Jak & Daxter because, at a time when console devs rarely spoke much about the tech behind their stuff, and at a time when games were almost universally programmed in C/C++ with bits of assembly language, the developers of Jak & Daxter openly discussed how they had written the bulk of the game logic in a custom Lisp dialect they called GOAL, which itself was built with Common Lisp. If you don't know what Lisp is or understand why that's cool, well - Lisp is a very interesting programming language that pioneered a lot of incredible ideas in computer science and that certain hackers develop a real connection to, including one of the biggest names behind this site/Y Combinator, but has always struggled a bit in the market. Seeing it used in a AAA game production like this was, for those hackers, really exciting; maybe because it might be the beginning of an industry-wide move towards Lisp (which never happened), or maybe just because a Lisp success story like this was vindicating.
This appears to be a (work-in-progress) source port of the game and the GOAL language, produced with a lot of reverse engineering work. So it's neat to finally get to see first-hand this GOAL Lisp stuff that we've heard about for years, and if the project reaches completion it'd also make for a great way to play the game on modern hardware or mod it.
branperr|4 years ago