How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes

[WipZedKay]

This probably the best marketing for a game I have ever seen.

[U.Inferno]

A screenshot I took of the title screen just now takes up 10x the storage of the entire game.

[rpavlik]

The "shift the axis of symmetry" trick is really clever!

[Dan-mwzu]

The thing that amazes me the most is that Micro Mages would have been entirely possible to create in the 80s on stock NES hardware, but video games themselves were only really a decade old and the craft was simply too young for developers of such incredible ingenuity to even exist. Had this released in 1983, it would be looked back on as one of the most groundbreaking games ever.

[kopmis]

If this game would have been released 35 years ago it would have been a genre-defining classic and one of the best looking NES games ever

[electroflame]

I wonder how well this game would sell if it released during the NES era.

[alessandrodilecce]

Have you ever thought about a whole documentary about these techniques? The video was really interesting, now I wanna know more!

[hiatoPS]

It's insane to think games back then were written in Assembly.
It's a miracle so many got released at all.

[fsxaircanada]

The animation for when you're doing the optimization is the most satisfying thing ever

[Andreas_Mann]

Using the spare bit to shift the tiles was an amazing idea.


Great watch!

[nyxies-too]

when time travel is invented, someone take this to back when the NES was released, instant video gaming legend.

[NOTNOTJON]

Next project: a cartridge that plays a 2 second MP3.

[Versaucey]

We need more people like you in the video game industry.

[jamdiaz]

The graphics are almost near SNES quality but managed to fit it to run for the NES great job man! The soundtrack is well made as well

[janLilin]

That is just insane. I can imagine if I was a kid back then, I'd have played this so much. The level of optimization at play is incredible, and I'm amazed it's just 40 kilobytes. Buying right away.

[FloatingSunfish]

Truly a prime example of doing it for the art.
You gotta admire these game developers who not only think around limitations in ingenious ways but also have the passion to code in _friggin' _*_Assembly._*

[kristijanoros]

Developers then: I have succesfully made a 40kb game
Developers now: omg my health bar takes 1Gb of space halp

[KanjoosLahookvinhaakvinhookvin]

You HAVE to give them props for making a four player game for a system with two controller ports

[torqtorqtorq]

This is by far the greatest video I've ever seen to explain why game dev on the NES was so hard and why Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami were such masters of their craft.

It reminds me of writing music in the .MOD format in the early 90s, where we had to get deeply creative with the use of our 4 tracks and would pitch shift, arpeggiate, and slide samples to turn them into different instruments. Very often the bass line and all percussion would be sharing a track, and only one or the other could play at any given moment in the song. This led to the introduction of things like a "C note bass + snare" sample to use at the exact moment the bass needed to play a C and the snare needed to hit. It was a trade-off; to get those sounds at the same moment, we had to give up a few KB of memory. All in the name of adhering to the 8-bit limitation and keeping the file size as low as possible because, on a 2400 baud modem in 1992, 300KB of song would take a minimum of 21 minutes to download, and you'd only have 60 minutes in your BBS login per day. Adding a 12KB sample meant adding a full minute to the eventual download, so we aimed to keep those file sizes as low as possible.

Even writing music for the NES was like this; 5 tracks, and each track dedicated to a different waveform with a digitized sample track. Putting in a short voice sample (like "no way, dude!" in Skate or Die) could eat up 10% or more of your total allotted game memory.

The connected world today is so much better in so many ways, but I still love the nostalgia behind cracking those limitations and finding all the creative ways to make it happen. It was natural puzzle-solving at its finest.

[kulitmed]

"Limitations breed creativity"

With that said, please make a SNES project!