I've worked at a couple of games companies and we didn't use Lua on any of the projects I worked on. One was starting to experiment with it when I left.
A large AAA studio I worked at actually rolled their own scripting language, compiler, and VM from scratch. I got to get my hands dirty with this. The only time since University I've had to utilise my compilers knowledge :)
Unity gives you the choice of C#, a JavaScript dialect, or a Python dialect.
Andy Gavin has a great series of articles on the making of crash bandicoot[0], [1]. (I'd recommend reading the entire series as it's very interesting).
It seems that in order to create an immersive world on the original playstation and keep up the speed of development, iteration and dynamism required for a game he wrote his own compiler (into assembly for the playstation one) for a lisp that he created called Game Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL)[1].
Because, in my opinion, when you create a tool for the masses, the individual preferences should be the last in line of factors when you choose scripting programming language for that.
> when you create a tool for the masses, the individual preferences should be the last in line
Well Javascript is Javascript because of some guy personal prefences at Netscape. The same is true for C# and Java in their respective companies, and they didn't start as popular languages either.
Javascript is literally the poster child for "accidental and completely illogical success". It's the only mainstream language that did not have to compete with anything else because of accidents of history.
But Netscape never had support for vbscript, so until they died Javascript/JScript was the only choice. By the time IE reached dominance, the industry had already standardized on JS.
JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme not once but twice, and the reason we use it instead of a Lisp in the browser is the insane competition with Microsoft. Source: interviews in Coders at Work.
A large AAA studio I worked at actually rolled their own scripting language, compiler, and VM from scratch. I got to get my hands dirty with this. The only time since University I've had to utilise my compilers knowledge :)
Unity gives you the choice of C#, a JavaScript dialect, or a Python dialect.
Why not lisp? :D