90s kid | Gerard Rodes

90s kid

2026-06-15

I was born in the mid-90s. I remember that winters were cold, autumn was windy, spring was exciting, and summers were a blessing. My parents knew everything, and whatever they said was true. My grandmothers were like extra mothers, but with the great advantage that they let me eat more sweets.

Click! Click! Click! Chsssffff!

This is the story I think I tell myself to explain who I am and where I come from.

When I was little, I loved playing in my room. I spent hours playing in silence, imagining adventures with my dinosaurs, Action Man, Pokemon, and any other figure, building structures and fighting robots with off-brand Lego bricks. My favorites: Casper's mansion and the Micro Machines truck (cool 😎).<br>I loved Scalextric, and I was always trying to build circuits different from the one you were supposed to build, even if I had to force the pieces to get what I wanted. I built towers with boxes and chairs to give my races verticality (and more excitement).

It opened up and had a whole city inside, brutal!The motorbike fired a torpedoIt had a flashlight that projected bats!

I have been very lucky in this life, and I am eternally grateful for the childhood I was allowed to enjoy. But among all those toys there was one specific category that had a special place in my heart.

One of my best friends was celebrating his birthday. I think we must have been 5 or 6. The title of best friend was very important at that age, although I usually admired practically all my friends for one of their unique qualities: the way they spoke, the fact that they always got 10/10 in math, or how good they were at football.

During that birthday party I saw something that fascinated me: around a giant tube TV were my classmates, with a PlayStation on the floor and Crash Bandicoot on the screen. I did not know what I was seeing, but I really remember, with intensity, the orange and green colors on the screen. I wanted to play, although I was embarrassed. The birthday boy was playing and he seemed very good, so obviously I would be terrible and embarrass myself in front of everyone. I don't know why I have always had this perception of myself, even as a child, as if I were trying to stop people from discovering that maybe I did not deserve to be there. I think that way of thinking is what has limited me and made me self-sabotage many, many times, and also what, at certain moments in my life, has made me work beyond what I knew others were willing to work, to push myself toward my goals.

Back to Crash Bandicoot. I remember very well what fascinated me: "There is a world behind that screen, full of colors and surprising creatures, and I want to investigate it and discover every one of its secrets". That game was not exactly an exploration game, but I experienced it that way, and from then on that would become a recurring pattern in my life: the search for universes waiting to be discovered and solved, full of mysteries and surprises waiting in every corner.

Crash Bandicoot, I remember seeing it on a giant TV

When it was time to leave the birthday party, I burst into tears. My mother was very surprised. I was an extremely well-behaved child, I had a lot of respect for my parents, I never talked back to them, never contradicted them, and it would never even have crossed my mind to cry in public or make a scene. Never. But I did not want to leave yet. I still had so many questions about that world inside the screen.

All things Andy Gavin

Many years later, I would discover that Crash Bandicoot has my favorite devblog, which, because I found it so fascinating, I would read at night on the terrible Kindle web browser. In it they tell very interesting things, like:

The creators of Crash (Naughty Dog) had the idea of making a new mascot for the PlayStation, and transforming the 2D games of the time into 3D by positioning the camera behind the character, keeping the camera constantly fixed on the character's ass instead of seeing him from the side. They called it "Sonic's ass game", that is how they tell it in the blog.

That to display that amount of polygons, the game required a precomputation process where the required rendering order was determined for each polygon in the level, depending on its position (the camera runs on rails, so they only had to know which part of the level you were in), so they could have a precomputed Z-index.

How, because the levels did not fit in the console's RAM, they invented a streaming system (with no interruption to gameplay) that changed the data in memory depending on your position in the level. Something they would later patent, which allowed them to make a lot of money because it was something many other developers would want to add to their own games.

The creation of a LISP-based scripting language, for everything that needed tweaking and immediate feedback from the game itself (enemy AI, physics ratios, etc.), so they could adjust it without...