Oh man, reminds me of a Game Dev war story I read years ago. This purportedly happened in those console days with very limited memory capabilities. In some gam

Oh man, reminds me of a Game Dev war story I read years ago. This purportedly happened in those console days with very limited memory capabilities. In some game studio, as a project neared its release, the team was still struggling with memory issues. No matter what they did, they had a surplus of just about 2MB. The artists have reduced their polygon counts drastically, the programmers have checked every possible leak, have optimized algorithms and buffers the best they could but the 2MB surplus just kept haunting them. That's when the VP of Engineering stepped-in. Calling the TL of the project into a closed-doors optimization code-review, they had the source code on a large screen and the TL talked the VP through everything the team has done so far to stay within the memory budget. As the TL finished the walkthrough, the VP opens some mother-of-all files and deletes a cryptic variable declaration to the effect of: int toLiveBuffer[2000000]; The VP then explains that he hid this declaration in their codebase after a project that had to optimize drastically late into the development cycle. But first he wanted to make sure that the team did their homework. And poof. They emerge from the closed-doors meeting jubilant and victorious. The game is ready for prime time!