Not really. The GOOL code was used for character logic and things like the load/save screen. The majority of the code was written in C and MIPS assembly.

Was the GOOL code interpreted or compiled?

Edit: mostly interpreted, according to [0] which I found below.

Edit2: wait, the article later says that the GOOL code was compiled into [MIPS] R3000 machine code...

0. https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba...

It was used for all of the gameplay code. The C and ASM were just the engine level primitives. On the systems I've seen, the gameplay code can outnumber engine code 5 to 1.

You're talking to the guy who wrote crash bandicoot

dmbaggett was one of the original authors of Crash Bandicoot - I think he remembers how it was implemented.

I'm not convinced it'd be impossible to use the GOOL code though. It should in theory have been plausible to port a GOOL interpreter, and then simply use the original code in the new interpreter. That said, there are some possible complications with the approach, depending on how tightly integrated the old GOOL system was with the rest of Naughty Dog's very custom engine.

Of course they'd need to actually have the GOOL code to start with. It sounds like all they got from the original games was the original meshes and some other non-code assets, which ... I mean, that's some incredible reverse engineering work. I'm much, much more forgiving of the tiny little inconsistencies here and there given that context; the team did a fantastic job if they were primarily going off reference footage.

IIRC the GOOL code was compiled by a compiler written in Common Lisp. If that compiler code survived, it's probable that it would still work today with minimum / perhaps zero modifications. (No idea what non-standard CL features it might have used.) Of course the output wouldn't be useful for anything but a PS1, but you could change that, and never have to touch the GOOL itself as you say.

I would think the lesson from this is, "don't build an in-house custom Lisp variant for all of your games unless you're willing to distribute the documentation, compiler, and dev tools with your source code."

If it's intrinsically doing any code modification (which as I understand it does in order to dynamically load and link code), even with all of that they might be up shit creek. Some of these platforms don't allow anyone, even the kernel, to make pages executable without providing signatures.

Well, if your platform can't support implementation of typical Lisp/dynamic idioms, then it's frankly a shit platform and doesn't deserve to be called "general-purpose computer".

Rather unsurprisingly, game consoles are not intended to be general purpose computers.