How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it whenever discussion turns to how old games were so small, as a clear tour of 8-bit optimization and creative work under hardware limits.
What it is
Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2019 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec splch · 2021-11 · on “Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?”
I love this video: [this video] As part of a Kickerstarter campaign, Morphcat Games made this video explaining how they eked out a really incredible game with only 40 Kb (a lot like Super Mario Bros 2). I definitely recommend checking this out as they go over interesting compression methods and more general thought processes.
Strong rec arnaudsm · 2023-11 · on “Street Fighter II, subtile accurate animation (2021)”
Here is my favorite video about 8-bit era optimisations. Makes you appreciate games from this era even more. This arcane magic survived in the demoscene to this day. [this video]
Recommends MrFoof · 2019-10 · on “Super Mario Bros. game was just 31 Kilobytes. How's that possible?”
Very much agree with the parent. If you want a better idea on how you can cram everything into 40KB — using every trick in the book, including ones not considered 30+ years ago — take a look at a how a recently released NES game (Micro Mages) managed it. Their primary design constrain was that they restricted themselves to 40KB, despite wanting to do far more than the games that were done in 40KB back in the 80s. [this video]
Recommends alecco · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?”
ZFS for newbies [LINK] main ideas behind ZFS and why it blows out the competition in many scenarios Making C Less Dangerous in the Linux Kernel [LINK] NUMA optimizations in the FreeBSD stack (Netflix) [LINK] How we fit a NES game in 40KiB [this video]
Recommends Timpy · 2020-10 · on “Top games from the JS13K 2020 competition”
I'm absolutely blown away by some of the games they managed to make in under 13kb. This video "How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes" is an interesting illustration of just how small these games are. [this video]
Recommends MrFoof · 2023-11 · on “Yoyozo (or, how I made a Playdate game in 39KB)”
A similarly interesting story is regarding the NES homebrew game, Micro Mages. The goal with Micro Mages was to get a full-featured game into the same footprint of the original, "Black Box" NES releases for the North American launch, where a fair number of games fit in 40KB of ROM or less. Video, but it's a good summary: [this video] Morphcat has done other great NES games as well, such as Space Gulls and Bobl.
Recommends throwawayk7h · 2024-08 · on “Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers”
Incredible. I love these stories of kb games. For those interested, there's a great video for this 40 kb nes game, micro mages: [this video]
Cites nineteen999 · 2020-08 · on “Architecture of the Nintendo DS”
I remember seeing this video on that about the clever compression tricks used to cram the sprites and map layouts into 40K. [this video]