I saw this interview, too. It blows my mind that Crash himself accounted for a third of their budget for onscreen polygons, something like 550 polys, which is more than many PS1 games managed to render for an entire scene.
They also didn't use any texture memory for Crash; only shading. This went against all received wisdom, and shows how much they were ready to face every challenge posed to them by going back to first principles.
They also wrote a software-based Z-buffer implementation. And a custom compression system that allowed vertex-based animation. And scene streaming from disc. And...
> Crash was 512 polygons in the first game, with textures only for his spots and his shoelaces, and his model didn’t change much through the 3 platform titles. It took me a month to settle on the perfect 512. As Andy said, we went with non-textured polygons instead of textured ones on most of the characters. Instead of texture, we used corner colors to create the textures that seemed to be there.
> There were many advantages to this strategy. The simplest was that we got more polygons. But we also solved a texture stretching and warping issue inherent in the PlayStation’s renderer that tended to make textures look terrible. Since you spent most of your time looking at the character, and he could get quite close to the camera, avoiding texture mess meant a lot for visual quality.
> And there was another important issue solved by using polygons instead of textures. The PlayStation tended to render every polygon as a pixel, no matter how small it got. Had Crash’s pupils been texture, they might have disappeared when the got smaller than a pixel. But by making the pupil 2 polygons (a quad), they almost always showed up as long as the total eye, including whites, was more than a few pixels tall. Subtle, but trust me, it made the game so much more clean looking. It’s the small things that matter.
