I was on the first Tiger Woods PGA team for the first PlayStation (the one that had the South Park 1st episode hidden on the disc.) The PGA source was legacy co

I was on the first Tiger Woods PGA team for the first PlayStation (the one that had the South Park 1st episode hidden on the disc.) The PGA source was legacy code, having been ported and rewritten for every console to date. It was a serious rat's nest, with the compiled code far too large to fit into memory, so EA had developed their own code segment loader to enable their too large to fit executables to run on the consoles. I was put in charge of the "menu front end", the statistics tracking, and some of the AI logic. It was over a week just to read the logic and figure out WFT. The designs I had to implement were simply not possible with the existing framework, so I started over. I wrote a series of small finite state machines, fully documented their use in the source code, and then replaced the entirety of all the portions of the source code I was in charge of with my miniscule finite state machines and their paltry data. The segment loader was no longer needed for the front end, because I'd left 800K free (on a 1 MB system!). I spoke with a Tiger Woods PGA developer about a decade later, and my code was still there being used. And a year later, EA had me do the same thing to the AIs for NCAA Football, where I finite state machined their AIs, clobbering the memory required down to about a 6th of what it was previously.