Super Mario 64 was built with a system written in Lisp

Mario 64 wasn't itself written in LISP at all. It's models were built in Nichimen graphics, a SGI based 3D design tool written in Allegro CL.<p>As far as I know, the games we did at Naughty Dog (Crash 1-3, Jak 1-3 + X), and later Uncharted were the only major console games which large amounts of runtime Lisp. The Jak &#38; Daxter series was 99% written in my Scheme dialect GOAL, including all the assembly. The only parts that weren't were libs talking to Sony's libraries (C++).<p><a href="http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/category/games/" rel="nofollow">http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/category/games/</a>

In 1983, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, the first releases from Lucasfilm Games, were built with a system written in Lisp. It was a 6502 assembler with Lisp syntax and a Lisp-style macro facility, written in Portable Standard Lisp, running in Berkeley Unix on a 4MB VAX 11/750. Unfortunately it was eventually abandoned because the developer had left and it was a bit of a strain on the VAX that was shared by the whole development team.<p>Yes, I wrote it. Yes, it was my first non-academic programming job. Yes, the users complained about the parentheses, and the slowness. But, they also took advantage of the powerful macro facility.

I built an iPhone game with Scheme, and I have to say, it was the best debugging/development environment I've ever had.

Doom was built with a system written in Objective-C.<p>Clairvoyant, those 90s game developers were.

It's a little disingenuous for Franz to claim any credit for Nichimen. Nichimen N-Graphics was the spinoff of the Symbolics S-Graphics system, written in ZetaLisp. Symbolics ceased new development and there were customers for the graphics system, so it needed to be ported to a Lisp environment that would run on available hardware.<p>Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp, developed during Project MAC at MIT. ZetaLisp was also a direct development of Maclisp. I'm guessing this shared ancestry helped in the software porting and made Franz the natural choice for the N-Graphics. But the press release just blows a lot of smoke about the speed and scalability of Franz.

It is cool but I wonder how many customers you get with a story that is 15 years old. The world has moved on.<p>I did some really early Apple Newton development work in around the same timeframe ('96, '97) and the early Newton development tools were also all written in Lisp. Probably Mac Common Lisp.<p>Not so strange of course since many people on the Newton team had a strong OODL (Object Oriented Dynamic Language) background. These are mostly the same folks with SmallTalk, Lisp, Scheme and Dylan experience.<p>Awesome times. But not much of it is left.

The Jak and Daxter series (PS2) was also written (almost?) entirely in Lisp, too.

Thanks for sharing this link. I'm giving a talk on Lisp and computer games at my university in less that two weeks from today. It's great to have more examples to share.<p>BTW. Abuse is a half-C, half-Lisp game.

I've also found this resources talking about Lips in the gaming world:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp</a> <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter</a> &#60;-- regarding Jack &#38; Daxter mentioned in the comments.

Note that the article seems to be talking about the tools used to build the game, not the game code itself. I'd guess this means things like texture editing, level design, and such.

This seems like pretty old glory to trumpet in 2011.

Haven't you ever unlocked Lambda Mario? I thought this was pretty clear... ;)