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This is actually an incredibly interesting topic in game designing, as many of the early video games best mechanics that are nowdays considered iconic actually started as clever solutions to system limitations.

It bothers me that nowadays games don't even try to streamline the processing or visuals, because they just assume that anyone who wants to play their game has a super powerful computer capable of insanely resource-intensive graphics. Back in the day they would at least put in the effort to make their games run well without needing a NASA supercomputer.

10 gigs of RAM and I still have trouble running Skyrim without insanse fps drops :Omegalul:

Actually because of system limitations, it got one dev team to get real creative in rendering great distances at low cost of performance. Normally, there were games like Silent Hill that use fog to obscure incoming renders....

...but Spyro The Dragon is perhaps the first documented design of a feature known in many games as "Level of Detail", where distant entities are rendered cheaply, only to be updated with more expensive polys/textures the closer they become.

Space Invaders' rapidly advancing aliens were the result of sprites being cleaned from the render, which meant the render and location executed faster which = the aliens sped up.

More clever decisions based on limitations: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/top10/2706-the-top-10-creative-decisions-made-due-to-technical

Bonus tidbit about Spyro: the devs didn't like the actual render space being short and wanted the game to feel a lot more "open-worldly" and expansive. This feeling was from them having played Super Mario 64. Thus their creativeness and design of LOD which allowed Spyro to achieve such a level.

Next time you're playing a game that is so outwardly expansive and distant objects are so blurred and cheap in detail, that's because it's to prevent the GPU from spending so much time rendering. Many games do this -- most notably MMOs. But it had to be done in the PS1 days because the graphics renderer, even though powerful, strained a lot.

Yup. Love it when they assist creativity and of course, when clever devs go for infinity and beyond.

I think it was the best idea ever. Who would've thought that such a clever design would lead to one of the most creative means to expand the view of the playspace? I mean, even the render had limits (distance) but it allowed for even greater distance than previously witnessed.

But of all things, even if the graphics render was robust, the primary reason for the strain was the memory. Only so much detail could be loaded in. Because of this, cheap GFX cards in the day soon played the wide expanse MMOs of the era. And while it may have been done prior, it was the FIRST for the PSX.

I still find it amazing that we came with so many clever solution with past hardware limitations, yet nowdays it seems companies always seem to struggle with optimizing performances for their games.