Packing the infinite truck ::<br>Dinko Pehar
Packing the infinite truck
July 4, 2026
— 8 min read
Imagine that everything needed for a move must travel in one truck.
Capacity and correction
It is an ordinary truck, and it can return if something is forgotten.
Because the truck can return, packing does not need to be perfect. That is<br>useful. A forgotten box can still arrive. A mistake can be corrected. But the<br>ability to return does not make the second trip free.
The second trip is not a disaster or a punishment. It simply has a regular<br>cost: more fuel, more time, another stretch of driving, and more work for<br>everyone loading and unloading it.
Now imagine that the goal is to avoid another trip entirely. The obvious<br>answer is to hire a larger truck. It costs more than the ordinary one, but<br>everything is more likely to fit. That is also a regular cost. We are buying<br>capacity because we believe it will cost less than returning.
The larger truck solves the immediate problem. It also makes poor packing<br>harder to notice. Half-filled boxes, unused furniture, and things nobody<br>remembers loading can travel together without forcing a decision. Empty space<br>feels free after the truck has been paid for, even though a smaller load must<br>still be driven, unloaded, and sorted from a larger vehicle.
But what if you had only a single small truck, one that would leave once and<br>never return?
Packing changes immediately. If boxes are placed wherever they fit at first,<br>the furniture may not fit later. Smaller boxes can go inside larger ones.<br>Loose objects can fill drawers, cabinets, and gaps between furniture.<br>Packaging that carries no value can be removed, and something less important<br>may stay behind so that the complete load can fit. The order matters because a<br>poor decision near the front can waste space all the way to the back.
The smaller truck forces the people loading it to pack smarter. The constraint<br>forces you to think about the problem.
Constraint-driven design
If we take an older console, such as the original PlayStation, we find the same<br>visible edges as the small truck. Its memory, processing capacity, and storage<br>medium were fixed. If a scene did not fit in memory, the team could not<br>increase the machine’s capacity in production. If the console could not draw<br>everything a designer imagined, there was no better PlayStation model with<br>more memory or processing power available.
The release itself was close to a one-way trip. Once a game was pressed onto a<br>disc, boxed, and placed on a store shelf, it was effectively final. Corrected<br>revisions were possible, but producing and distributing them was slow and<br>expensive.
The release build carried a different kind of weight because this disc is<br>the game .
Those boundaries did not create one universal style. Different teams packed<br>their trucks in different ways.
When capacity is finite, creativity starts to kick in.
Crash Bandicoot is perhaps the most literal example. Its developers wanted<br>levels far larger than the PlayStation could hold in memory at once. Instead of<br>reducing the ambition to whatever fit naturally, they built custom compression,<br>resource-packing, and virtual-memory systems. Geometry, textures, animation,<br>sound, and code could be moved through the console’s limited memory as they<br>were needed.
Source: Andy Gavin’s development retrospective. Crash Bandicoot © Activision Publishing, Inc.
The hardware imposed strict limits, but those limits did not reduce the team’s<br>ambition. They pushed the developers to become creative about how levels were<br>built, packed, and loaded. The technical system and level design evolved<br>together, like boxes arranged carefully so the entire load could fit.
Resident Evil made a different tradeoff. Fully real-time 3D environments could<br>not provide the visual detail its creators wanted, so the game used<br>pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles. The PlayStation had less<br>work to perform while each room could look richer and more deliberate.
Source: official GOG release page. Resident Evil © CAPCOM.
The fixed camera was also more than a technical compromise. It framed scenes<br>like shots in a film. It could hide what waited around a corner, show danger<br>that the character had not reached, or leave the player moving toward<br>something outside the frame. A rendering decision became part of the language<br>of survival horror.
Silent Hill is the example I return to most. The PlayStation could not render<br>the town far into the distance, so fog concealed its limited draw distance.<br>Buildings, streets, and enemies beyond the visible area did not need to be<br>rendered. The technical limitation reduced the console’s workload while making<br>the town more unsettling.
Screenshot contributed by MAT via MobyGames. Silent Hill © Konami Digital Entertainment.
The fog turned missing information into tension. Players could hear danger<br>before seeing it, and empty streets felt uncertain because the...