I've heard cool stories from game development before, but this guy is on another level. These aren't just neat hacks, these are serious engineering feats. Several of them. For Crash Bandicoot.

- A custom animation compression system

- A custom memory paging system between memory and disc

- Reverse-engineering the hardware and standard lib

Edit: Apparently at the time he already had a PhD from MIT and had worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gavin