Game Oriented Object Lisp

Game Oriented Object Lisp, usually shortened to GOOL, is a programming language that Andy Gavin designed at the game studio Naughty Dog to control the behavior of game objects in the Crash Bandicoot games. It is a dialect of Lisp built on the idea that code steering characters, enemies and other objects runs only a few times each frame, so speed of writing and rewriting matters more than raw execution speed. Gavin's 1996 article on the language describes an optimizing single pass compiler, full power macros, symbolic names, multiple ultra light threads and a state system in which every object carries its own local state. Gavin has written that GOOL was used in Crash 1, Crash 2 and Crash 3, that it was mostly interpreted although by Crash 2 basic expressions were compiled into machine code, and that Way of the Warrior had a much simpler version of it. The Jak games that followed used a new and far more capable language, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.