I'm sure this is covered elsewhere in this large thread but I also worked on a triple A game in the nineties, one of the first 3D FPS games with a huge story. Every aspect of the game's memory footprint was tuned. I spent over two months at one point just going in and reducing every structure to remove unneeded waste and to quantize variables down to the absolute minimum. Bools were held in a single bit. If a variable only needed less than 256 values it would be held in a single byte. I changed a lot of data structures to be highly optimized and crushed down to just what they needed to still work. The non technical producer couldn't understand that I spent two months and was so joyful that the game was running and _nothing_ looked different.
