[sambeau]

I have a friend who works in games who would secretly add a malloc to the initialisation code that would just hold onto a large chunk of memory. Come the point just before release, where everyone was desperately trying to fit the final assets into memory, and about to throw stuff out, he would do an 'optimisation' pass and free up the memory so they could ship without delay.

[groestl]

Oh, "the balloon". A quite common technique.