The predecessor to GOAL was GOOL and was 100% Andy's work. We used it to code the logic for the objects in the Crash games (critters, platforms, etc.) and I act

The predecessor to GOAL was GOOL and was 100% Andy's work. We used it to code the logic for the objects in the Crash games (critters, platforms, etc.) and I actually wrote the entire load/save UI in it as well! I assume GOAL was also all Andy but I don't know that for sure because I only worked on the Crash games. ITA's use of Lisp was driven by our co-founder and Chief Scientist, Carl de Marcken. He wrote the prototype in LispWorks, then the production code in Allegro, and then we finally ported everything to CMUCL when Franz essentially tried to extort us for a tax on our entire business. (We couldn't imagine this would become the norm for consumer "apps" five years later, but that's another topic entirely.) Ultimately the MIT AI Lab circa 1993 was the source of the decisions to use lisp for both these commercial products. At the time, the lab's culture was still very much influenced by all the work done there and in spin-off companies in the late 80s commercializing lisp, e.g., at Symbolics (first registrant of a .com domain name!) At INKY (my current startup) we use Python. By 2010, when I started the incubator that evolved into INKY, it was pretty clear that scaling a development team on a lisp stack was going to be really difficult.